Wonder Woman Film: 5 Reasons Why It Should Follow Man Of Steel

4. We Need More Equality in Superhero Films

trinity As odd and as wrong as it may sound, there has never been a stand-alone, live-action superhero film with a woman in the lead role. You would think in this day and age that a superhero film starring a woman wouldn't be an after thought, it would be common place. There's at least four major superhero films coming out every year, why doesn't one of them have a leading lady from Hollywood in the main role? The brutal truth is that female superheroes are not as popular as male superheroes. However, there's an enormous caveat to that statement as there are far less female superheroes in existence. In fact, the ration of male to female superheros is 10 to 1. That is simply unacceptable. The traditional line of thought is that "women don't read or buy comics as much as men do." While I have no doubt that both Marvel and DC's main demographic is 18-34 year old males, I've never seen any concrete evidence to back this up. I personally know fairly equal amounts of male and female comic book fans. I even know several ladies that would put most of us men to shame when it comes to comic knowledge or the size of our monthly comic pull lists. There's also a drastic difference in the number of male and female comic book writers for Marvel and DC. Want me to prove it? Name the first 10 male comic book writers or artists that come to your mind. Now name the first 10 female comic book writers or artists that come to your mind. See what I mean? The point I'm trying to make is that the level of equality that exists in comic books and superhero films is inexcusably too low. There's no reason whatsoever that it should be. I'm not going to sit here and say that a Wonder Woman film would create a new generation of writers and artists in the comic book industry but I would personally love it if it did. After all, Wonder Woman is the most powerful female superhero in the DC Universe and is more often than not pictured right along side Batman and Superman as to show her being "equal" with the two greatest superheroes ever. I just wish DC Comics and Warner Bros. treated her that way. Instead, the biggest news we have about Wonder Woman since the New 52 re-launch is a picture of her kissing Superman since apparently she's his new girlfriend...or whatever. It's easy to see where the priorities lie. Jill Pantozzi from The Mary Sue summed up this inequality perfectly several months back: "The bottom line? It's not that women aren't reading comics, it's that a lot of women aren't reading DC comics and there are legitimate, concrete reasons for that. Why do women make so much noise about what's going on at DC? They WANT to read your comics. They LOVE your characters. They're just turned off by how they're represented. It's an incredibly easy fix if you'd just try."
Contributor
Contributor

Contributor for WhatCulture! Writer and Podcast Panelist for ModernMythMedia.com. Executive Producer for the documentary, Legends of the Knight. Follow me on Twitter @JoshCostella.