Kirylin’s Voice

There’s been this huge to-do around many of the geeky girl, feminist, and geeky girl feminists blogs this week about an interesting statement coming out of Warner Brothers. Apparently, one of the higher-ups came out and said Warner Brothers would not be making any more action movies where the lead character was female.  (If I remember correctly, Warner Brothers is the studio currently working on Wonder Woman. Without a female lead, that action movie should be very interesting. *grin*)

Naturally, the geeky girls, the feminists, and the geeky girl feminists went off. It managed to intimidate Warner Brothers enough to then come back and claim that they never said they weren’t going to make any more action movies with female leads. Apparently, they have three movies with female leads in the works for next year. You may notice, as many have, that they never actually say they have three action movies with female leads planned next year, which will neatly let them off the hook when this becomes an issue again a year from now (because you know it’s not going to die quietly).

Truthfully, there have been some action movies that have tanked over the past few years. In most cases, though, I think nearly everyone would agree that what caused the movie to tank wasn’t the fact that there was a female lead. It was the fact that either the writing was poor, or whatever material was being adapted was adapted very poorly (a complaint that covers male-led action movies, as well).

It should be interesting to watch this play out over the next year or so… Maybe in the meantime, we can come up with a way to keep action movies (original or adaptation) from sucking, regardless of the gender of the lead.