binary solo said:
So out of those 25 movies what's the split? I'm not sure you are correct in that, there are certainly female superheroes that are much more well known among the mainstream population than Ant man, for example, albeit most or all of those female superheroes are DC properties not Marvel properties. Arguably Marvel could have made Wasp and have Ant man be the side character who came on stream at the end of the movie. Wasp is as well known among the comic book fandom as Ant man, and deciding to set the movie after Hank Pym retired from super hero duties meant there was no essential reason for Hank's invention to get its first outing on a male character. If the first Ant man had been set back when Hank Pym was a wife beating inventor and quantum physics genius, then making him the first shrinking superhero would be the only option, but that's not what they did. I would even go so far as to say Wasp, starring Evangeline Lilly, would have been more successful than Ant man, starring Paul Rudd; as long as they still had Michael Pena of course. So you might think your explanation is obvious, but even with you articulating it I don't agree it's a legitimate reason to exclude them from a consideration of whether there's reasonable gender balance in leading roles in 2015 movies. I think you also need to consider target audiences. If most of the female leads are in movies that are directed at a female audience, whereas the male leads are a mix of general audience and male audiences then you could still say there's an imbalance. If Hollywod churns out three female lead $20 million budget, chick flick, cookie cutter, rom-coms and one $150 million budget male lead block buster, if you just go by number of movies then you could say Hollywood is suffering an oestrogen overdose. But if you go by investment input and expected audience demographic mix and size then things swing back in favour of the one big budget movie. |
11 out of 25 but that's including the superhero movies and movies like Bob SquarePants, Ted and Paddington.
You're giving an example of the wasp being more popular than Ant-Man. Not sure how correct that is since I only ever heard of Ant-Man in passing (though I did hear that he created Utron) but never heard of The Wasp. Since The Wasp was Ant-Man's sidekick, why would they switch the story around? You are free to speculate that The Wasp would gross more than Ant-Man but that would be just speculation. Also, let's not forget that Ant-Man is a weird situation since it was supposed to be the first movie and work started on that before the MCU was a thing.
I gave a good reason why most of the superhero movies are led by males but you only came up with a thought about The Wasp's popularity vs. Ant-Man's.
And since we're talking about the highest grossing movies here, it's safe to assume that most of these aren't your average $20M budget movie.
