4. All Movies MustHave a Female Lead Who is Neither the Love Interest or Mother Figure
This rule should be passed just to see what Hollywood does with it. The results would be FASCINATING as hundreds of lazy screenwriters, suddenly deprived of the easy route of just making the girl character The Girl and leaving it at that, would be forced to actually develop female characters that exist on their own terms, not just to lust after/mentor/all of the above with the true hero of the film, The Guy. Because thats what 99% of the female leads in Hollywood movies are reduced to. They have no agency or will of their own, existing entirely as a reaction to the arc of the hero. Even if a woman is introduced as being intelligent or resourceful, the plot will engineer a scenario in which the female character is placed on the sideline or otherwise incapacitated so that the hero can do the actual work of resolving the plot. Its not enough to just hand the only girl around a sword or a gun and have her running around in the final battle, you have to make the effort to create an actual CHARACTER who has a reason to be there besides The Hero told me to. Look. This is not hard. Movies and TV have been desperately aping Joss Whedons use of strong female characters for well over a decade now and James Camerons before that. Yet they still somehow missing the entire freaking point of what made those characters work. The reason Whedons writing for women is considered so important and seminal is not because he was the first guy to have a tiny girl beat the crap out of a big burly guy. Thats just a simplistic visual approximation of what he was after thematically. No, the reason fans adored (and continue to adore) Buffy, Willow, Tara, Codelia, Fred, Zoe, et. Al. is because they were multi-faceted, layered people. They had strengths, weaknesses, fears, specialties, goals and ambitions and inner pains. Romances were a part of that personality but they were never the DEFINING aspect of those women. Whedon carried that over into this past summers AVENGERS with the character of Black Widow. While she spends much of the film concerned about Hawkeye, she is also taking part in interactions and events which have nothing to do with him. And even after Hawkeye had been rescued and redeemed, Black Widow is still an active part of the group, fighting on the front lines and serving a crucial, vital role in the outcome of the film. The romantic relationship is a part of the character, but it is not what defines Black Widow. You could have changed or removed the romance from her section of the film, and the core of Black Widow would still have been present. Compare that to, say, Carol Ferris of Green Lantern or even Elizabeth in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and youll see characters who make gestures towards completeness, who hint at deeper personalities, but are in the end reliant on the more dominating male characters to give them definition. Elizabeth Swann is defined by her romantic relationships and reactions to Jack Sparrow and Will Turner, and Carol Ferris is defined by her evolving relationship with Green Lantern. Enough of this. There is no reason in this day and age why female characters in movies should have to exist as echo chambers of the male heros own greatness. That Black Widows strong characterization was considered a breath of fresh air (if not a total surprise by people who dont know Whedons work) speaks more to how shameful most movies are in this regard than to anything revolutionary that Whedon did.