Superhero battles an old Hollywood problem
HOLLYWOOD Wonder Woman burst into cinemas around the world this week, backed by some of the best reviews ever collected by a superhero film. But it is still too early to tell whether the most nervously awaited blockbuster of the year has really succeeded.
On-screen, the tiara-wearing heroine played by former Miss Israel Gal Gadot is on a mission to save friends from destruction by German forces in World War I. Off screen, Wonder Woman is doing battle with an even fiercer enemy: the entrenched forces of Hollywood sexism.
The film has a woman as its lead character and a female director. Astonishingly, that is enough to make it a radical and potentially transformative challenge to orthodox Tinseltown thinking.
American studios have made more than 300 live action films with a budget of US$100 million or more. Until this week, only three of them had been directed by a woman (and two of those were made by Lana Wachowski, who established herself as a director on the Matrix films when she was still called Larry).
Patty Jenkins, who directed Wonder Woman, had not managed to make a film since Monster won an Oscar for Charlize Theron 13 years ago.
Hollywood has churned out 39 superhero films in the past decade based on characters from the Marvel and DC Comics ‘‘universes’’, without finding time to make one blockbuster led by a female character. From Spider-Man 3 to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, they have all had either male leads or heavily male ensemble casts.
This one-sided model has left the studios worrying about a phenomenon known as ‘‘tent pole fatigue’’ (in Hollywood, even the anxieties sound suspiciously male-oriented). This is what happens when your ‘‘tent poles’’ – giant films intended to support studios – became so similar that audiences begin to tire of them.
Wonder Woman offers the prospect of an antidote if it can draw a previously under-served female audience into cinemas without losing too many of the fanboys seen as the heart of the regular comic book blockbuster audience.
The Hunger Games series and the two most recent Star Wars films have shown that female action heroines can appeal to large audiences. Superhero films are the final frontier.
‘‘The bottom line is always what’s important in Hollywood,’’ says Jonathan Kuntz, a film history lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television. ‘‘If Wonder Woman is a smash hit, it’s going to make a big difference. You can bet that a dozen more WARNER BROS women-centred superhero films are going to get green-lighted, and we are going to see more women directors getting prominent roles.’’
If the film comes to be viewed as a flop, it could equally hold back the cause of women in front of and behind the camera. Kuntz is optimistic, though.
‘‘There’s a lot of people rooting REUTERS for this movie from a lot of quarters,’’ he says.
In the past 30 years, comic book fandom has become much more diverse, with women sometimes outnumbering men at conventions, but you would not have known it from Hollywood’s output before this week.
‘‘That’s what we are rolling the dice on: are these women really going to come to see this movie?’’ Kuntz says. ‘‘I suspect they are.’’
Wonder Woman currently holds a rating of 93 per cent on the review website Rotten Tomatoes – and provided it holds up at the box office, there are follow-up superhero projects in the wings.
Gadot and Jenkins are already signed up for a sequel; Brie Larson is due to play the lead in Captain Marvel in 2019, and The Avengers director Joss Whedon is working on a Batgirl film.
If they are all equally good, they might even banish the memory of the female superhero turkeys Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005), with their Rotten Tomatoes average scores of 9.5 per cent. Maybe. But probably not. The Times