28% of major Hollywood movies today have female leads, as compared with 11% up through 2007. What explains this difference? The Hunger Games. Before the Hunger Games films took off, Hollywood tended to believe that girls and women only liked romances like Titanic and Twilight (and, well, Beauty and the Beast and Fifty Shades, to highlight more recent commercially successful romances-of-sorts). The Hunger Games' success convinced some filmmakers that there was now a market for female-led action movies, to which end we have since seen such notables as Lucy, Mad Max: Fury Road (my favorite!), and the new Star Wars movies, among others. That may compose a very small share of the action films genre overall, but it nonetheless represents something that didn't exist in any appreciable way before The Hunger Games hit in 2012. Overall, female-led films take in an average of 16% more revenue than male-led films these days. And the popularity of many of these movies is leading to more getting greenlit.
Another movie that was greenlit for creation on these grounds after The Hunger Games was Wonder Woman: the first "tent-pole" superhero movie about a female character. Since DC Films and Warner Bros. announced the Wonder Woman movie, five more female-led superhero films have been announced:
1) Marvel Studios, under Disney, has announced that a Captain Marvel movie, to be co-directed by a man (Ryan Fleck) and a woman (Anna Boden), which is slated for release in the first half of 2019.
2) DC Films, under Warner Bros., has announced plans for a Batgirl movie, to be directed, written, and produced by Joss Whedon (who is perhaps best known for creating the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer), as well as 3) a Gotham City Sirens movie directed by the talentless David Ayer (see Suicide Squad), but mercifully at least written by a woman (Geneva Robertson-Dworet).
4) Sony has announced plans for a movie called Silver and Black about the supporting characters Silver Sable and Black Cat from the Spider-Man comics "universe" under the direction of one Gina Prince-Bythewood.
5) And most recently, Patty Jenkins has been confirmed to helm a sequel to Wonder Woman, which she suggests she'd like to set in the past, around the 1930s or so, in the United States.
Out of those five movies, Gotham City Sirens, a female-team Suicide Squad spin-off, sounds easily the least interesting to yours truly, while frankly Wonder Woman 2 sounds like it has the most potential, though I'm also intrigued by the Silver and Black team movie, and particularly by what I'm learning about the character Silver Sable. Batgirl and Captain Marvel sound like the kind of material I could take or leave.
But you see how this all started? With one movie. Without Wonder Woman, none of these other five movies would be greenlit, and without The Hunger Games, Wonder Woman would never have been greenlit. In the world of profit-driven movie-making, success begets multiplication, which begets more success. Somebody had to try and make a good female-led action movie and have it make a lot of money. That is the bottom line. Movies take a long time to make, so progress has been a little slow, but the future of action movies for girls and women, including comic book-inspired superhero movies for girls and women, looks bright! By the start of the next decade, I think we can expect these to become a regular thing.
There are other mediums still need their proverbial Hunger Games. Video games still haven't really had one, for example. (Which is why I've suggested that American video game developers consider examining the success that Japanese game-makers have had in attracting female players.)
As to how Wonder Woman is doing commercially, the answer is quite well! Currently, it's the third-highest grossing movie of the year to date (here in the U.S. anyway) and is projected to make $41 million more in domestic ticket sales alone this weekend, which means it would be outpacing U.S. Suicide Squad ticket sales by 4%. The significance of outpacing Suicide Squad in revenue is that Suicide Squad was a team hero movie, while Wonder Woman is about a solo hero character. Team hero movies tend to perform much better at the box office than solo hero films do because, when it comes to the former, each hero character has its own fan base that combines into one giant audience. Some projections now even suggest that Wonder Woman could even ultimately sell more tickets than Batman vs. Superman (another DC team hero movie) despite being an origin story. It's wildly outperforming the filmmakers' expectations. Originally, the filmmakers projected that Wonder Woman would have a $70 million opening weekend in the United States. Normally the rate of ticket sales for any given movie dips by about 50% with each successive weekend it remains in theaters, so if the original projections were true and this had been a normal movie, here's how the first three weekends would have stacked up in domestic revenues:
Weekend 1: $70 million
Weekend 2: $35 million
Weekend 3: $17.5 million
Here, by contrast, is how it has actually stacked up in domestic revenues:
Weekend 1: $103 million
Weekend 2: $58 million
Weekend 3: $41 million
Observe not only the unexpectedly large opening, but also how remarkably small the weekend-on-weekend dips are. What it all means is that this movie has hit the cultural sweet spot for 2017 and will, you can bet, remain in theaters for the rest of the summer. Honestly though, I think maybe the experts should've expected something like this after the record-breaking turnout for the Women's March earlier this year. If there is anyone to truly thank for this remarkable outcome, it is Donald Trump, who's presidency has ensured that feminism is very in this year.
In other Wonder Woman news, did you know that there's a movie about the character's creator William Marston, called Professor Marston & the Wonder Women, coming out later this year? It actually sounds like a very interesting story, given that the man appears to have led a very unorthodox life and possessed a very unusual worldview. Marston was a in three-way relationship with a pair of feminist women apparently, whose views he shared, and wrote the comic in the early 1940s under a pseudonym after becoming worried about the impact that male-centric superhero comics like Superman were having on the culture. He described Wonder Woman as "Psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world." It could be just as interesting as Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman movie itself was!
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
