10 Ways Comic Book Movies Keep F*cking Up Female Characters
Look on your sins, Hollywood, and despair...
Suffragettes rejoice, next year heralds a new era of female comic book movies, as Wonder Woman, arguably the star of Batman vs Superman, finally gets her own film. Apart from animated versions, it has been 41 years since Lynda Carter's successful TV-movie of Wonder Woman, and now Gal Gadot is flying in on her invisible jet to save the day.
But where are the rest?
According to surveys, 46.97% of comic book readers are now female, which is pretty close to a 50/50 split. Couple this with the fact that more and more of our "male" heroes are being swapped out for female versions, and it means that we now have a female Thor, She-Hulk, and Riri Williams as Iron Man.
Why then do Marvel, DC, and beyond keep f*cking up our heroic heroines? Think back over the past 16 years of the comic book movie boom and you would struggle to name more than a handful of truly great female characters.
Talk of a Black Widow solo-outing may be on the cards, but with the industry the way it is at the moment, I wouldn't hold your breath.
Here are 10 ways in which cinema is screwing with our wonderful women...
10. We Only Remember The Bad Ones
Catwoman will dog the female portrayal of comic book characters until the end of time.
When you think of female superheroes in film, it's not exactly inspiring, thanks mostly to the noughties run of femme fatales that did nothing to help the industry. We had the disastrous Elektra, which rolled off the back of the equally awful Daredevil film, where 20th Century Fox decided to give Jennifer Garner the limelight.
The future of the female comic book slate looks much better, but they have a lot of ground to make up thanks to the likes of Elektra and Catwoman. Halle Berry herself is a double offender thanks to Catwoman and her awful portrayal of Storm in the X-Men films.
When it was announced that Berry was demanding more money than ever to appear in Days Of Future Past, we thought that perhaps this time Storm would be much better... Ok, maybe not.
The point is, it's incredibly hard to shake off those terrible ghosts of the past.