Maybe there will come a day when we can talk about big-budget Hollywood movies that happen to be female-driven in terms of whether we liked the movies or not.
But that day is a very long way off.
The problem begins because there are so few of these films, which puts huge pressure on each of them to do a yeoman’s work in the culture wars. Of the tentpole releases by Hollywood’s six major studios for the rest of this summer only two—the bawdy comedies Rough Night and Girls Trip—could be described as female-driven. Of those, only Rough Night also has a female director. (The picture looks slightly better if you look down the list at non-studio releases. Slightly but not much.)
The near total, now century-old lockout of women from the highest rung of movie production is a level of gender imbalance that the Dabney Coleman’s archetypal chauvinist boss-pig character in 9-to-5 could only dream of. If the petroleum or pharma industries dared to open so few doors to women, their headquarters would be burned to the ground.
In the superhero realm in particular—which for post-modern Hollywood represents the highest rung of corporate achievement—the lockout has been notable. This modern age of superhero blockbusters officially dates back to 2008’s Iron Man and the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 1. (That designation is invoked without a trace of irony in Hollywood). In the seven years since there have been a grand total of zero superhero movies directed by women and a similarly grand total of zero about women. The official explanation for this dates to the 2004 flop of Halle Berry’s Catwoman which cemented the Iron Law that women didn’t want to see superhero movies unless they were dragged by their boyfriends.
Given all this, when Warner Bros and its DC Films division announced they were making a film about Wonder Woman and that it would be directed by the first-ever female director in superhero-dom, expectations and conversations around the project became instantly loaded, with every bit of cultural baggage in Hollywood thrown onto the project’s back. The director, Patty Jenkins, whose last feature film was the low-budget (but critically-lauded) 2003 drama Monster, suddenly had the weight of her entire gender’s hopes for the industry riding on her work.
Worse still, as the film moved forward, unsettling rumors drifted out of Wonder Woman. There was scuttlebutt that the film was a mess, a disaster. Reshoots! New directors brought in! It’s hard to sort out how much of this talk was true, and how much was cranky studio gossip, and even if it was all true, a messy production does not necessarily mean disaster for a film.
However, even the possibility that the “first” female superhero film led by the first female superhero director might be less than amazing, gave everyone the jitters. For many, there were fears of a replay of last year’s Ghostbusters debacle, which kicked off as a fanboy backlash against the reboot’s feminizing makeover, and then ignited its own, official counter-backlash, so that by the time the film debuted, pointing out that it was a clunky, misguided script with a dearth of laughs was akin to saying women had no business fighting ghosts, or appearing in movies. Cowed and terrified by the fury around the film, critics were eventually herded into signing mild stamps of approval, which in the end weren’t enough to save a movie whose non-gender-specific problems audiences were able to smell a mile away.
Debates about movies with any toe in any sort of cultural battle are now subjected to the same team-spirit loyalty tests that plague political debates. Nuance about a clunky script or a meandering third act are beside the point. You’re either for the film (and thus for women, or homosexuals, or African-Americans) or against it (and them).
Given those exaggerated stakes, you could hear sighs of relief when word leaked from the first test screenings that Wonder Woman was . . . not a complete mess. The first reviewers to get a peek at the film emerged with enthusiastic thumbs up. (Though of course the media lists at these early screenings are curated for those with Upward Pointed Thumbs at the ready.)
Nonetheless, the specter of Catwoman still hangs heavy over the movie. Should Wonder Woman fail to launch, it’s worried—not entirely without justification—it would be another 40 years before a woman was handed the keys to one of these contraptions.
And so, as Wonder Woman unfurls her golden lasso this weekend, the critical response has become not just, “Yeah, it’s a good movie, as superhero movies go.” But “Hallelujah! Wonder Woman is the greatest superhero movie since Gandhi!” How steep a curve is it being graded on? As of this writing, Wonder Woman’s Rotten Tomatoes rating (an aggregation of all critics’ reviews) stands at 93 percent—a mere five points below last year’s Oscar winner Moonlight and the same as runner-up La La Land. Maybe it’s really that good! Then again . . .
Across the internet, however, woe be upon the critic who fails to show sufficient fealty to the film. This morning, New York Magazine’s David Edelstein may have brought his long and respected career to an end by publishing a review which dealt, many Twitter detractors felt, a bit too long on star Gal Gadot’s appearance. Oh boy.
Earlier this week the Hollywood Reporter interviewed director Patty Jenkins and set off a mid-sized fury when it was found to contain an impolitic, observation, saying that Warner Bros had “[gambled] $150 million on its first woman-centered comic book movie with [a] filmmaker whose only prior big-screen credit was an $8 million indie.” The line was true, and relevant, and hated all the more because of it.
But while you can brow-beat reviewers and manipulate the press, you can’t social-justice the numbers. On Monday, studio estimates saw Wonder Woman opening to as much as $60 million domestically. But as audience tracking moved this week, expectations rose and Wonder Woman is now expected to open north of $100 million.
God help us all if she comes up short.
Richard Rushfield is editor of The Ankler, a daily newsletter about the entertainment industry. Subscribe to The Ankler here.
