Hollywood’s survival might depend on figuring out what women want
In many ways, 2017 the movie year has been unsettled as 2017 the year in everything else: If the past twelve months can be reduced to a pithy phrase, it might be “radical realignment.”
The year began in tumult, with Meryl Streep calling out the reality-TV star who had recently been elected president and a gobsmacking gaffe at the Oscars when “Moonlight” won best picture after “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the big winner. The year continued apace, as Hollywood careered haphazardly between wildly unexpected successes and “sure things” that bombed just as dramatically.
The year's first sleeper hit, Jordan Peele's satirical horror movie “Get Out,” was part of a larger trend of horror pictures that did smashingly well at the box office, including “Split,” “Annabelle: Creation” and “It.” But the most eerie thing about a movie that ingeniously combined laughs and jump scares to critique the most subtle ills of racism was how it anticipated a year when white supremacists made news, emboldened by a president they viewed as tacitly and sometimes even explicitly supportive.
“Wonder Woman” turned out to be even more successfully and just as uncannily prescient, as its director, Patty Jenkins, has become the highest-grossing female filmmaker of all time, and studio executives who have spent decades catering to teenage boys learned that their core audience is more interested in a genuinely compelling woman who saves the day than another dude in spandex going through the motions. In fact, as Hollywood faltered with such big-budget flops as “Baywatch,” “Alien: Covenant,” the new “Transformers” movie and a misguided “Mummy” reboot, it was female audiences who made the spring and summer survivable, turning out in droves to see the live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” “Wonder Woman” and “Girls Trip” (as well as the indie breakout hit “The Big Sick” and, later, the beguiling coming-ofage dramedy “Lady Bird”).
Which made it all the more galling when the year's biggest blockbuster opened — not a movie, but a scathing New York Times exposé of movie executive Harvey Weinstein and how for years he has sexually harassed, exploited and even assaulted the female actors and executives in his orbit. (Weinstein has denied charges of rape and has disputed many of his accusers' accounts.) As similarly distressing stories cascaded — not just about Weinstein, but also about several men in the entertainment business — the connection between the biases and blind spots of male gatekeepers and the dreary movie monoculture of heroic men and silent or hypersexualized women became appallingly clear.
Just how Hollywood will look in a post-Weinstein era is still playing out, but if that realignment isn't radical enough, the industry experienced yet another seismic jolt just a few weeks ago, when Disney bought 21st Century Fox in a deal that has reduced the “Big Six” studios to five, and casts the future of midrange, adult-oriented dramas into uncertainty. The very day the deal was announced, Streep, Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg were visiting The Washington Post discussing their new movie,