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.

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

Okay, I’m actually talking about the National Association of Theater Owners, but I couldn’t resist that title and neither could you if you were in my place, don’t even pretend.

As the only female head of a major studio, Amy Pascal knows her stuff when it comes to the industry. So when she says of female directors that “the whole system is geared for them to fail,” maybe she knows what she’s talking about. Just maybe.

Note the sarcasm, please; I just wanted to get ahead of any mansplainers who might want to say things like “But I was in a directing class once and most of my fellow students were men, so maybe there aren’t that many women who wan’t to direct!”

By Tumblr user rvain.

As the daughter of an attorney, I feel compelled to say that this is something you can always work out with a loved one beforehand, in writing. (CubicleBot)

Back when Paramount announced that it would be postponing the release of G.I. Joe: Retaliation nine entire months, ostensibly to retrofit it with 3D and reshoot some scenes, we raised our eyebrows suspiciously. Hollywood is sort of reeling from the success of The Avengers, because while it means great things for Marvel Studios and everyone else involved in the production, it’s kind of sucking the life out of the rest of the summer blockbuster season.

See, the thing about The Avengers is not that it had a huge spike in attention, made a bunch of money, and then got out of the way for the next batch of action blockbusters. It’s sitting around, the 800 pound gorilla and the unexpected houseguest all in one. Which brings us to Universal’s press release on why they’ve delayed the latest installment of their highly successful Bourne franchise.

As we know, there is a dearth of women working behind the scenes in Hollywood, even if we have seen a slight improvement since the 1990s. But when I say “improvement,” don’t get too excited. Using the numbers from the LA Times, women working high-level jobs in non-acting jobs in film — directors, producers, etc. — accounted for 18 percent of the whole lot, up from 17 percent 14 years ago. “Improvement” over the course of 14 years amounts to one percent. In politics, that’s within the margin of error, so it might not even be that accurate. This means less movies that are geared directly to women. And now, one of the women who usually appears in front of the camera, Meryl Streep, is using all that attention we pay to her to ask a very important question: “Why? Why? Why? Don’t they want the money?”

You may have heard that G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which was set to premiere a little over a month from now on June 29, was suddenly pushed back to March 29, 2013. Even after Paramount had already started advertising it, and not subtly. As in, there were commercials on TV, during the Super Bowl, and posters outdoors, and Hasbro already had the toys on the shelves. Paramount’s stated reason? They were going to add 3D effects to it. But the real reason? Well, imagine you have this party to attend, but you had a huge zit on your chin, and you popped it, and it’s a big hot mess. Now, imagine that zit is Channing Tatum, and the party is G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

Sylvester Stallone is upset, you guys. Upset that action movies just aren’t what they used to be. You know, back when men were men, and so were action movies. Now it’s just a bunch of magic guys in tights who don’t participate in any real action because their magic make it too easy. And that’s not action. I mean, look at those freaking arms! Sylvester Stallone never let anyone do any CGI to him, I’ll tell you that.

But seriously, he said that action films are “fading away.” Has he not been to the movies at all in recent years? Man, he’s been working hard on Expendables 2, sequestered all the way up in that Tibetan mountain lodge, far away from civilization as we know it!

We haven’t done a lot of coverage of G.I. Joe: Retaliation here, for a number of reasons. None of the editors are huge fans of G.I. Joe, so it’s difficult to write about it with knowledge. The first movie… uh… was not considered to be that great. And while I found the trailer really amusing, with its transparent excitement over having Bruce Willis in the movie, it wasn’t amusing enough to get me interested in the movie.

But now G.I. Joe: Retaliation has done something really interesting, really inexplicable, and quite possibly really stupid. Yesterday, Retaliation was one month and five days from release. Today, it is ten months and four days from release.