2. Women Finally Got To Play Traditionally Male Roles
Seen In: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, Ant-Man, Sicario, Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Trainwreck, Inside Out With The Hunger Games, arguably Hollywood's most successful female-led franchise, drawing to a close in 2015, it's probably fair to say that Jennifer Lawrence's role in the lead of a dystopian action flick seems a lot less unusual now than when the series began just four years earlier. More and more often over the last few years the notion that nobody will go and see a female-led blockbuster has been proven to be entirely misguided and in 2015 there were more women playing traditionally male roles than ever before. As Evangeline Lilly' remarked in the Ant-Man mid-credits teaser "It's about damn time." That moment promised an eventual female title character in a Marvel movie, once Ant-Man And The Wasp is released in 2018, but 2015 gave us Agent Carter and Jessica Jones headlining Marvel TV series in the traditionally masculine roles of secret agent and private eye. Sicario and Mad Max: Fury Road might have tried to hide the fact that the tough action badass that drove their stories forward was a woman by titling their movie after the male lead. Few who saw either, however, could deny that Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron were the real star, with both getting more screentime, more action and more of a central position to the narrative than their male co-star. The most obvious case of a woman taking centre stage, though, came in the year's biggest movie. With The Force Awakens being otherwise essentially a reworking of the themes of the original trilogy, it was an impressively progressive switch to give the Luke Skywalker role of the traditionally male "hero's journey" plot to Daisy Ridley's Rey. It wasn't just in action movie roles that women were at the forefront like never before, though. The Judd Apatow comedy of arrested development and the Pixar buddy movie have always been something of a sausage fest as sub-genres go, so in a way Trainwreck and Inside Out are even more significant for women getting more diverse roles in future.
