Why Don’t We Have a Lady Superhero Movie Already?
The fact that this is the closest we are getting to a Batgirl movie is just sad.
Superhero movies are not new. They give little boys an image to live up to. But what about the little girls; who do they have? Right now the only prominent female superhero on the big screen is Black Widow and maybe Katniss Everdeen if we stretch the definition of a superhero.
There are currently one hundred and four American superhero movies out or in development, and five have women as the main hero. That is 4.8% of superhero movies. Men get Superman, Batman, Ironman and countless sequels, and women get the terrible Supergirl, Tank Girl, Elektra, Barb Wire, and Catwoman.
This year we are getting Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie which has a talking raccoon with a machine gun and a talking tree man as a body guard, yet there is no female super hero movie even in development. Sure, there have been rumors of a Wonder Woman movie for years, but who knows when that will get made. Now, with the popularity of the Avengers and the X-Men Franchises, there are also rumors of a Mystique and a Black Widow movie, but again, those are just rumors. We need something concrete.
Part of the reason why there are so few female-based superhero movies is the fault of both the comic industry and the movie industry, both of which are still heavily biased towards men. Most stories that they tell are men’s stories, but that is slowly changing. The popularity of the Hunger Games, Divergent, Alien, Tomb Raider, Frozen, and, yes, even Twilight, proves that movies starring women in a lead role will make a profit. Hunger Games, Frozen, and Twilight all made over a billion dollars, and they prove that a female can star in an action movie just as well as any male actor can. Comics are also moving away from the typical male stereotype, with more women buying comics, and female superheroes gaining popularity.
So with all of that, why are we getting Ant Man instead of Black Widow? Why another Superman instead of Wonder Woman? Is it because the public is not ready for them? No, it is because the studios are not ready to admit that women can be heroes, too.
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