In a time when Joss Whedon had to cajole Marvel into including Black Widow in The Avengers and we still don't have a Wonder Woman movie, the young adult literary fantasy film is perhaps primed to become an equalizer of sorts in the world of film tent poles. We may be entering an era where the blockbuster landscape is divided on gender lines. For boys, you've got the various Marvel and DC superhero spectaculars, along with the likes of Transformers and Star Trek. For girls, we're seeing a wave of young-adult literary adaptations with dreams of becoming the next mega-franchise. Yes, if it needs to be said, obviously any number of female moviegoers enjoys the likes of Iron Man while any number of male moviegoers flocked to The Hunger Games. But the demographic targeting at work is pretty clear. The conventional wisdom for the last 15-20 years has been that the would-be tentpole was by definition a boy-friendly fantasy film centered around a male protagonist.
Yes, it's no accident that the would-be blockbusters that really broke out of the pack (Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar) were mostly the ones that actually bothered to have fully fleshed-out female characters and made sure that they played a key role in the narrative (the initial Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy is arguably Elizabeth Swann's journey). But in Hollywood for generations, the cliche has generally been that the widest-appealing films were action-heavy boy pictures that happened to have a token amount of female appeal (which according to studio executives was defined as 'romance' and/or 'hunky male leads who take their shirt off'). Overtly macho action pictures like The Last Boy Scout had a proverbial box office ceiling, while something like Speed (appealing non-asshole hero, well-written female lead) could cross gender lines and become a smash. But explicitly targeting females was tantamount to box office poison outside of the romantic comedy genre.
What was important about The Hunger Games is that is production (and that of the upcoming sequel) was watched and feverishly covered with the same respectful intensity that greets the newest Marvel sequel. The key difference is respect. Films like The Host or Beautiful Creatures are being afforded the same relative respect on film blogs and entertainment journalism sites as the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Star Trek Into Darkness. We can argue that the anticipation isn't as feverish among male-centric movie news sites (I won't pretend I'm more excited for City of Bones than Man of Steel), but neither is it as automatically dismissive as comes with reporting Twilight news or the latest star-driven romantic comedy. What we may see in the coming years is something vaguely resembling an even playing field. If Beautiful Creatures (which I'm seeing tonight), The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and/or The Host are big hits, what we may be looking at is a gender dividing line in the realm of would-be blockbusters. We may very well see a franchise landscape where boys are 'served' with Thor: The Dark World while girls are 'served' by Mockingjay (with cross-gender movie going on both sides of the aisle).
It'll be capes and robots for boys, magical powers and romance for girls. The male-driven comic book films, with exceptions like Spider-Man, will be advertised as action-packed with just a touch of romance. The female-driven literary franchises, with exceptions like The Hunger Games, will be advertised with an emphasis on romance with just a touch of hard action. Is it a net-good that female audiences have their own tent-pole franchises, featuring heroines instead of heroes as a matter of course, or is this a 'separate but equal' situation? If this all does come to pass and the female audience finally gets their own proverbial tent-poles, then (irony of ironies) The Twilight Saga may end up being the most female-empowering franchise in modern history.
Scott Mendelson
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In the Avengers, they try to save the world from aliens, while in the Host, a girl and her symbiotic alien fall for the same boy. No, seriously.
It's not the 50's anymore, Hollywood; women have other interests than men.
Yes, but they have interest in men, too. This is not an either or deal, you know. And it is worth nothing that the romance part of the plot is a lot more realistic than the magic powers saving the world part.
My point (which I may have failed to fully express) is not that there needs to be less romance, but more like there are other plots that could be done, but almost never are and what this teaches young girls, that finding a man should be their number one priority, might be a little unhealthy.
They are also the ones who claim that genre pics don't draw a crowd, for instance a movie with gay subjects. That argument falls apart when you notice that worldwide Brokeback Mountain made more money than "Scream" and yet for the next decade or so we got multiple Scream Rip-offs and and sequels and yet not one major studio put out another picture with gay subjects as the main focus.
The studios don't know what will sell. They are just a bunch of old bigots that are always 2 decades behind the audiences.
The same people that didn't want to put Black Widow in "The Avengers" are the same people that in the last year have green-lighted pictures staring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartsenegger and Bruce Willis and action heroes in spite of multiple bombs credited to all three..