What! No Female Superhero Movies?

Posted on March 18, 2014 at 3:58 pm

On top of the distressing news that Halle Berry’s Storm character in the new X-Men movie has been cut down to one scene — possibly just one line — and Anna Pacquin’s Rogue removed entirely, comes some more bad news. According to CinemaBlend, Marvel’s Kevin Feige has announced that there are no plans to make a female superhero movie.

Marvel has either released, or officially announced, thirteen movies. That includes a trilogy for Iron Man and Captain America and two Thor films, and none of these films have focused on lead females at all. The Avengers counts one female among the core group, as does Guardians Of The Galaxy.

Hey, Kevin, “Gravity” and “The Hunger Games” did pretty well last year. There is a big audience for women-led action movies, and there are a lot of actresses in Hollywood who are ready for those roles. I’m pretty sure you can find some story in the Marvel multiverses that would pass the Bechdel test.

New Report: Female Characters Still Under-Represented in Films

Posted on March 11, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Despite the critical and financial success of “Gravity” and “The Hunger Games,” it is still hard to find movies with strong leading female characters. A new report from Women in TV and Film shows little progress. The title is pointed: “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2013. Author Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D found that

Female characters remained dramatically under-represented as protagonists, major characters, and speaking (major and minor) characters in the top grossing films of 2013. Females comprised 15% of protagonists, 29% of major characters, and 30% of all speaking characters. Only 13% of the top 100 films featured equal numbers of major female and male characters, or more major female characters than male characters. Female characters were younger than their male counterparts and were more likely than males to have an identifiable marital status. Further, female characters were less likely than males to have clearly identifiable goals or be portrayed as leaders of any kind.

The findings on racial diversity were even more dismal. “Moviegoers were as likely to see an other-worldly female as they were to see an Asian female character.”

I hope this report embarrasses the studios into doing better in 2014.

Geena Davis Can Fix Hollywood Gender Stereotypes in Two Steps

Posted on December 13, 2013 at 3:58 pm

Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis has been a leader in understanding and improving the role of women in media. The founder of her namesake Institute on Gender in Media wrote a piece for the Hollywood Reporter citing data showing that there are three male characters for every speaking female in family-rated films: “We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.”

She proposes “two easy steps” for change.

Step 1: Go through the projects you’re already working on and change a bunch of the characters’ first names to women’s names. With one stroke you’ve created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they’ve had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?

Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.

As Davis says, “If they can see it, they can be it.”

Where Are the Women in 2013 Movies?

Posted on July 24, 2013 at 3:59 pm

New York Magazine’s Vulture blog has a sobering statistical analysis from Amand Dobbins showing that women play significant roles in a very small percentage of feature films.

The 2013 lineup is all superheroes and crass man-boy bonding. Granted, studios release these types of movies every summer, but usually they’ll at least give us one rom-com or female ensemble movie, or a woman in a role that is not “secretary to an Avenger.” Or so I assumed, based on fond memories of The Notebook and every mediocre Kate Hudson film ever made. This year seemed worse to me, and so I decided to do the math, comparing the number of women in major roles in the last five years of major summer releases with those in major releases from twenty years ago. It turns out that yes, 2013 is a bad summer — but it is far from a record low point. This has been a problem for 25 years now.

And it’s getting worse. “ven when counting courtesy roles, 2013 is the worst year in the modern era, and at 57 percent it’s below the average for the past five years…Less than 30 percent of all movies can bother to write in more than a wife or a sidekick.”

As the article notes, the success of “The Heat” will probably inspire a brief blip in women-led films. And there is one more encouraging note in a Buzzfeed collection of comments from writers about creating interesting, complex female characters. My favorite is Joss Whedon who responds to the question “Why do you write strong female characters?” “Because you’re still asking me that question.”

Even more encouraging is this list of 2013 movies written by women. Studios, take note of the talented women on screen and the writers and directors as well.

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