By Matthew Fulkerson/sports editor
With the deluge of superhero movies and films based on popular young adult fiction books, it’s surprising that studios aren’t releasing female-centric superhero tales.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, after a month in release, is on its way to becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year. Much of its success can be attributed to Scarlett Johannson’s work as Black Widow.
Fans of the Marvel movies are clamoring for the Widow to get her own stand-alone picture, and yet the higher-ups at Disney seem noncommittal on the question.
Some attempts have been made to shake up the rosters of the biggest superhero team movies with something other than white males, but make no mistake, they are not the leads.
Wonder Woman is perhaps the most famous female superhero on the planet, yet she has never starred (or even co-starred) in a live action movie. It seems a shame that her first on-screen appearance will be in a movie tentatively titled Batman vs. Superman.
Joss Whedon almost wrote and directed a Wonder Woman movie, but the studio pulled the plug when executives didn’t agree with his vision. Whedon immediately went on to direct The Avengers.
Even though Black Widow features prominently in the new Cap movie, it’s not called Captain America: Cap and Black Widow Run Around Spouting Witty Repartee and Punching People. The movie is subtitled with the name of a character that features in about 20 minutes’ worth of screen time.
It’s not for a lack of storylines that women aren’t allowed to headline their own superhero movie. Right now, two of the best comic titles from the major publishers are D.C.’s Batgirl and Marvel’s Captain Marvel.
Batgirl, as written by Gail Simone, is about a girl trying to move past a violent attack and empower those around her. Captain Marvel tells the story of a woman letting go of her baggage to become the hero everyone needs her to be.
If audiences can accept a green, rage-filled monster or a playboy that flies around in a metal suit as a hero, accepting a woman with superpowers shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
This is a pretty great time to be a comics fan, watching as characters and storylines burst off of the page into box office behemoths.
However, the golden age of superhero movies won’t really start until what’s on the movie screens reflects the diversity of their paper-and-ink counterparts.
