Last week self-appointed power broker Nikki Finke broke a story on her blog claiming that Warner Brothers president Jeff Robinov had issued the following decree: “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead.” Warner Brothers immediately and repeatedly denied everything, issuing statements through a variety of media outlets. Worse everyone involved, awful bloggers mostly, seemed to be using this as an opportunity to grandstand and shout about how important and awesome they were in Hollywood. There didn’t seem to be any point in covering it, and so we didn’t. The story should have been dead. Except it continues to live, but now only as an orgy of self-delusion and ego-boosting. If I see another self-important blogger claiming they’re some sort of Hollywood high-hat over this, I’m going to puke. The behavior of everyone involved is kind of sickening, even more sickening than the thought that the WB is nixing leading female roles.
Women in leading roles should be the topic everyone’s discussing, but if anyone is really discussing it they’re only doing it as a way to make themselves look good. But the future of women in film is an interesting topic. Warner Brothers is after all a business, and if movies with women in the lead aren’t selling you can’t really blame them for cutting back on them, if indeed that’s what they’re doing. I’m not saying it’s right, but I am saying I can see how it might make business sense. They can’t force you to buy a ticket for Catwoman.
Who cares which way the wind is blowing at Warner Brothers, why don’t movies with female leads do better? Because let’s face it… there is a problem. Jodie Foster’s The Brave One opened last weekend to amazing reviews, and promptly flopped. It wasn’t the first, flopping female-led films are pretty common. This year alone we’ve already had The Reaping and The Invasion as colossal failures. The recent past is littered with doomed, fem-led action films.
Granted, Foster’s previous movies Flightplan and Panic Room were box office hits, but perhaps not as big as other similar action movies starring men. And if you think about it, the difference between The Brave One and those movies, even though they were action movies, cast Foster in the traditionally female role of a protective mother. In Brave One, she plays a hard-ass vigilante. The same weird trend follows other female-led movies. Put a woman as the lead in an action movie like Aeon Flux or Elektra, where she’s in a part which might traditionally have been male, and it fails. Put Reese Witherspoon as a girly girl in a lovey-dovery romantic comedy, and it makes money. Make a fem-led movie about hair, shoes, and clothes like The Devil Wears Prada or Legally Blonde, and people show up.
Or maybe the real question is why aren’t female starring movies made better? Sure, a lot of them flop, but a disproportionate number of them are also pretty horrible. The Brave One was great, but Hollywood’s broken trail of failed female superhero and action movies is filled with really terrible scripts and sub-par direction. Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Elektra, and even the Tomb Raider movies which made money, were all universally and deservedly panned. Maybe the bigger question here isn’t why don’t these movies make money or why isn’t Hollywood making them, but why isn’t Hollywood making any good ones?
The sad truth is that if Hollywood quietly stopped making movies with female leads, I doubt anyone would even notice. How many female led films have you seen this year? Of the year’s top 30 earning films, none of them were carried by a woman. The only one that comes close is Hairspray, which was more of an ensemble and had John Travolta in a dress. It looks to me like this is a war that’s already been lost. Women are out, and America doesn’t seem to care.
