Unfortunately, The Winter Soldier was the best female-driven superhero film of 2014
Another year, another batch of superhero films centered on white men. With the X-Men franchise pushing its female characters further and further into the background, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is the most prominent female lead in a major superhero franchise. And she’s never even fronted a film herself. Even as female protagonists make inroads into sci-fi and action films, they’ve remained largely shut out of the superhero movie craze launched by Bryan Singer’s X-Men, legitimized by Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and revolutionized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’ll all change in the next few years as various studios finally bow to pressure and start making female-driven superhero films.
I’m overjoyed that female-fronted superhero films will theoretically be here in two to three years. But that doesn’t mean we should stop demanding more from an industry that already has six films centered on a white guys named Chris and 11 on millionaire playboys. In addition to a Captain Marvel movie and a Black Panther movie, Marvel’s docket includes eight films centered on white men. D.C.’s Wonder Woman announcement also came alongside a slew of male-driven projects. Why are superhero studios so timid when it comes too diversifying their worlds? Female-led blockbusters like Hunger Games,Lucy, Maleficent, and Divergent are regularly dominating at the box office. And given that Marvel can turn a talking raccoon and an anthropomorphic tree into household names, we’re well past the point of worrying that audiences won’t show up for female-fronted superhero films.
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