Running counter to Hollywood’s long-standing (and self-perpetuated) myth that woman can’t lead blockbuster movies, the top three films of 2017 all had female leads. Perhaps a shift is coming?
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi – $533 Million
- Beauty and The Beast (2017) – $504 Million
- Wonder Woman – $412 Million
- Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 – $390 Million
- Spider-Man: Homecoming – $334 Million
I remember this movie from the 80’s, it featured a female lead…..just a little film called Aliens. Wait, she was the lead in the Alien movie too!
There was also this little dystopian future time travel movie …. called Terminator.
Oh, and way back there was this almost completely ignored movie about a girl from Kansas….
You know what, maybe we could just make movies and things could work out alright after all…
We don’t need female led movies because “agenda” we need female led movies because we want to see their stories….
I loved Michelle Wolf when she was discussing Wonder Woman and everyone’s expectations of it.
She said: “You know when we’ll feel like women are equal at the box office? When we get to make a bad superhero movie and then immediately make another bad one. Men get chance after chance to make superhero movies. No one left crappy Batman v Superman saying, ‘well, I guess we’re done making man movies.’ “
That’s genius. I had my “you idiot man” moment when I watched the trailer for Annihilation. At one point, a team goes in to investigate the “Shimmer.” The question that popped into my head was, “Why is the whole team made up of women? What’s the reasoning for this? Is something inside toxic to men?” Then I smacked myself. If it was reversed, in no way would I have asked, “Why is the whole team made up of men? What’s the reasoning for this? Is something inside toxic to women?”
2017 was a political and environmental disaster (seriously, I was waiting for the plague of locusts to follow the floods, hurricanes, and fires). But if nothing else, I think we (Americans at least, and hopefully more than a few of us) learned something about ourselves and our society.
Right. It’s like the Bechdel Test and its variations. It was never designed to indicate whether a movie was good or not, but how the culture views women. If you reverse the sexes and apply a “Male Bechdel Test,” nearly every movie passes. About the only mainstream film I saw in 2017 that doesn’t is Noviatate— a good film, but it hardly set the box office on fire (and it’s set in a convent, so there’s not a lot of opportunity or reason for male interaction). But it’s still really common for a majority of successful films to fail the original test. It’s taken this long to have the kind of representation that currently exists, and it often leads to cries that, somehow, female representation is de facto anti-male and the sign of an eeeevil SJW bias.