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When Do Successful Women-Led Films Stop Being “Surprise Successes?”

Once More With Feeling

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.Linda Holmes for NPR.

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I recommend reading the entirety of Linda Holmes’ piece, “At The Movies, The Women Are Gone,” about how it is currently nearly impossible, in most parts of America, to go to a theater and see a work of fiction that is about a woman. However, I found this paragraph of it to be perhaps the most powerful one, and I have my own caveat to add: After the commercial success of The Hunger Games, Brave, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Prometheus (to pull merely from 2012 alone), and after the increasingly vital and action oriented roles of women in superhero movies like The Avengers and Iron Man 3, not to mention Man of Steel and The Dark Knight Rises in which the female leads have been praised as some of the best aspects of the film… After that, how long are we expected to pretend that a movie with a female Marvel or DC superhero in the lead is such farfetched idea?

Previously in Female Leads in Action Film

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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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