Women Heroes in the Movies...

[Chun-tzu]

An interesting experiment would be to have an established writer with a built in fan base, someone known for good writing (Bendis, maybe, or Morrison or someone), write, say, Spider-Girl and see what happens.

Like when one of the most popular Hulk writers of all, Peter David, took over the Supergirl comic book? Mixed results. The comic did far better than any previous Supergirl series or many new titles these days, but it too eventually faded away and is about to be replaced.

I think the lack of lead super-heroines is the real key here. I'm going to suggest something radical here. Perhaps Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men aren't inherently great characters either. When you think about it, there are a lot of silly aspects about these characters.

Now don't get me wrong, they are great characters. Why? Because they've been around for decades, spawning hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories. Like any comic character, they've been revised time and time again. This gives the potential for some really great stuff to come through and for a mythology to build around the character. Creating any new super-hero that's going to be successful in the movies, TV, or comics is an amazingly difficult task. For this same reason, we have no minority super-heroes with legendary status.

I'm not saying there couldn't be a successful super-heroine movie. I'm saying that you can't compare Catwoman and Elektra to Superman and Batman.

Quality alone is not enough. It's quality plus quantity. Take the Blade movies. We've got a really good start here. Throw in a successful Blade comic series (which has so far proven unattainable) and make it last for 10 years. Create a Blade cartoon show and make it last a few years. Children have to grow up with the adventures of Blade, like we did with Superman and the others. Then Blade will begin to achieve mythological status. Same for any female super-hero. Wonder Woman is the only contender here.

 

[Klaus]

Uhm...Birds of Prey(comic)...has been doing pretty well

Agreed. That's because it is well-written (by Gail Simone, no less).

Unfortunately, BoP had that dreadfull TV series...

Some years ago, the video game industry ran a survey on the gamers populace and found out that:
1) Female gamers are more likely to play a game featuring a female protagonist.
2) Male gamers are just as likely to play a game with a male or female protagonist.

Here's what I'd like to see in the big screen:
- A Wonder Woman movie that adapts the George-Pérez-reboot from 1987 (including Wonder Woman chopping Deimos' head off with her tiara.
- A Batgirl movie with Barbara Gordon and Cassandra Cain playing the mentor/pupil angle.
- A Vixen movie played as an action movie akin to Shaft. C'mon, she's a superhero AND a supermodel!

 

[Staffan]

I think the lack of lead super-heroines is the real key here. I'm going to suggest something radical here. Perhaps Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men aren't inherently great characters either.

The X-men are a bit of a poor example, given that a significant part of the roster, including some of the more high-profile X-men, are women. Phoenix and Storm are the only ones from the movie (but that only has Wolverine and Cyclops as male leads as well), and in the books you also get Shadowcat, Psylocke, and a bunch of others.

 

[Mystery Man]

The solution is simple - make a good movie.

Catwoman and Elektra were, by all accounts I've heard, horrible films. They dont speak to whether the audience is ready for female superheroes. They only speak to whether the audience is ready for really lousy movies.

Yeah, the whole "audience isn't ready" thing is a bunch of b.s. Blaming the audience for a stinker isn't going to get a good movie made.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

I think the problem is that Hollywood may tend to treat action movies with female leads as a kind of genre-film. So when they create such a movie, they expect the genre itself to carry the film, rather than create a compelling story that also happens to be part of the genre. A lot of bad sci-fi is produced this way as well. The writers/producers expect sci-fi fans to make a movie a success just because it's sci-fi, whether or not its a bad movie.

The turning point will come when Hollywood remembers that an action movie with a female lead is still, first and foremost, an action movie. The movie needs to be written well enough and directed well enough and acted well enough that it can succeed without depending on the sexuality of a female lead to pull it through. At that point, the female action hero movie will make a dramatic leap in quality, which will lead to a commensurate leap in monetary success. Indeed, at that point I would go so far as to suggest the female action hero movie might become the preferred action movie, since it would have all the writing/directing/acting quality of a modern male-anchored film, with the added advantage of offering a sexy female lead.

Others have already mentioned successful movies with a female lead. Alien, Aliens, Kill Bill, etc. etc. The key to all of them, in my mind, is that they were written primarily to be good action films, with the fact that the lead is a woman only a part of that main goal.

Or at least, so it seems to me.

 

[mmadsen]

Maybe one's standard of "good" (writing, movies, etc) is related to perceptions of gender and expected gender roles. Take the first two Alien films for example. Ripley is a strong female character, no doubt, but in some ways retains some traditional female roles. She's the scared woman alone in the dark in Alien, and the mother protecting her daughter in Aliens.

The role of Ripley was written for a male actor (in the first movie, Alien). In fact, Alien was originally going to take place on a WWII bomber with gremlins...

 

[Berandor]

Well, I have read somewhere that girls are better at identifying with a hero of the opposite sex than boys are. It was in a discussion about male-centric fantasy, and the writer claimed that when writing about a male hero (Harry Potter, for example), girls are able to feel with/for him much better than boys would be for/with Hermione Potter.

I don't know if that was a strawman, of if there's a kernel of truth in there.

 

[KnowTheToe]

I am going to go out on a limb and say, IMO, there are few if any good action movies with strong female leads. Too often the woman lead has a very sharp tongue and always has to one up everybody else. They are loud mouths and annoy me. They are also directed and acted way too over the top for my tastes. For the most part I think that writers write them the same as they would a man and again, IMO, I don't think that works.

Just having a femal lead in an action film will greatly reduce my interest in a film. With solid writing and directing I think it could be done, but they cannot use the same rules of the ganre they use for men.

 

[johnsemlak]

I think there tends to be a lack of female heroes/characters in in all genres of cinema, not just action movies.

How many movies can you think of that have no or nearly no female characters? I thought of this as I was watching Das Boot recently. There are certain genres that lend themselves better to female characters (comedy for example) but all in all I think the trend pretty much crosses genres.

Why this is can be debated at length. I highly doubt it's unique to Hollywood.

It is a trend going back many many years in cinema and theater. There was a time when female actors weren't used at all.

 

[barsoomcore]

I think there tends to be a lack of female heroes/characters in in all genres of cinema, not just action movies.

I think you're rather overstating the case. Other than action (war/western/whathaveyou) movies, what other genre regularly has no female characters? And the action movie audience is overwhelming male, so that's hardly surprising.

It is a trend going back many many years in cinema and theater. There was a time when female actors weren't used at all.

Well, that doesn't really have anything to do with story-telling. There were no female actors in either traditional kabuki or Elizabethan theatre, but that's because society at that time and place didn't want a bunch of sexy chicks running around in the company of hot guys, everybody changing clothes in the same room and getting all, you know, tangled up.

But there were plenty of female CHARACTERS in the stories they were doing. So the point isn't really relevant.

That said, yeah, most movies are LED by a man. And I think Berandor's point probably holds true: women will go see a movie led by a man, but men are less likely to watch a (non-porn) movie led by a woman. By the same token, both sexes are more likely to pick up a magazine with a woman on the cover.

*shrug*