![]() It’s why these women-led movies are framed and sold in a way that champions female empowerment. Viewers, in turn, want both someone to cheer for and a movement to cheer about. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel had to give women a superhero in whom they could see themselves - a single character encompassing a myriad of lives, just like the multiple male heroes who have been on the big screen over the past decade are meant to do. These movies, because of their gender-barrier-breaking milestones, had to not only make enough money to convince executives that they could stand with traditionally male-led heroes, but they also had to make up for the decade of stories where women were primarily sidekicks, love interests, or damsels in distress, not action heroes. And Warner Bros., after years of fumbling and complaining about how hard it would be to make a Wonder Woman movie, finally did so in 2017. Up until Captain Marvel’s debut in 2019, Marvel had never made a women-led superhero movie. ![]() For Birds of Prey and the women-centric superhero movies that preceded it, simply existing at a time when such movies are few and far between has posed an uphill battle. ![]() The most difficult thing for Birds of Prey might be that it came out in the year 2020. But is that true equality? What if the real fight for representation is in a movie’s shortcomings - as may be the case for the delightfully messy Birds of Prey? Birds of Prey is an important movie because there are so few movies like it The thought goes: The better the movie does, the more it feels like a victory for representation, and vice versa. The pressure of its own importance to superhero movies shapes Birds of Prey and the conversation surrounding it. There was pressure on Crazy Rich Asians’s box office numbers, for example, because its success dictated the future of Asian American representation when a movie dares to represent something other than the status quo, the movie’s supporters are forced to cross their fingers. But the concern that the success of each movie in a marginalized genre impacts that genre’s future comes with the territory. The attention paid to Birds of Prey and its cohort and reading their success as a bellwether isn’t unique to women-fronted superhero movies. It has happened in the past with disasters like Catwoman and Elektra, and those box office busts have directly led to the clear lack of women-led superhero movies compared to their male counterparts. Yet, because Birds of Prey is now just the third film after 2017’s Wonder Woman and 2019’s Captain Marvel in both the modern-day DCEU and MCU to focus on women superheroes, there’s a nagging worry that studio executives will take it to mean people won’t see women-led superhero movies. Thanks to the glut of male superhero-led movies, that Thor movie you didn’t see and the beleaguered Justice League are easier to write off as flash-in-the-pan flops when they don’t make big box office numbers. Despite Birds of Prey, Warner Bros.’s Harley Quinn spinoff, earning great reviews, and despite making an estimated $81 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the film has already been labeled a commercial disappointment in the DC Expanded Universe canon.īut the silly thing is that, because of how rare women-fronted superhero movies are, Birds of Prey’s disappointment is a bigger deal to fans looking for more representation in their superhero movies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |