Wonder Woman burst into cinemas around the world this week backed by some of the best reviews ever collected by a superhero film. But it is still too early to tell whether the most nervously awaited blockbuster of the summer has really succeeded.
On-screen, the tiara-wearing heroine played by the former Miss Israel Gal Gadot is on a mission to save friends from destruction by German forces in the First World War. Off screen Wonder Woman is doing battle with an even fiercer enemy: the entrenched forces of Hollywood sexism. The film has a woman as its lead character and a female director. Astonishingly, that is enough to make it a radical and potentially transformative challenge to orthodox Tinseltown thinking.
American studios have made more than 300 live action films with a budget of $100 million or more. Until this week only three of them had been directed by a woman (and two of those were made by Lana Wachowski, who established herself as a director on the Matrix films when she was still called Larry). Patty Jenkins, who directed Wonder Woman, had not managed to make a film since Monster won an Oscar for Charlize Theron 13 years ago.
Hollywood has churned out 39 superhero films in the past decade based on characters from the Marvel and DC Comics “universes” without finding time to make one blockbuster led by a female character. From Spider-Man 3 to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 they have all had either male leads or heavily male ensemble casts. This one-sided model has left the studios worrying about a phenomenon known as “tentpole fatigue” (in Hollywood even the anxieties sound suspiciously male-oriented). This is what happens when your “tentpoles”, giant films intended to support studios, became so similar that audiences begin to tire of them.
Wonder Woman offers the prospect of an antidote if it can draw a previously under-served female audience into cinemas without losing too many of the fanboys seen as the heart of the regular comic book blockbuster audience.
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The Hunger Games series and the two most recent Star Wars films have shown that female action heroines can appeal to large audiences. Superhero films are the final frontier.
“The bottom line is always what’s important in Hollywood,” says Jonathan Kuntz, a film history lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television. “If Wonder Woman is a smash hit it’s going to make a big difference. You can bet that a dozen more women-centred superhero films are going to get green-lighted and we are going to see more women directors getting prominent roles.” If the film comes to be viewed as a flop, it could equally hold back the cause of women in front of and behind the camera.
Professor Kuntz is optimistic, though. “There’s a lot of people rooting for this movie from a lot of quarters,” he says. In the past 30 years comic book fandom has become much more diverse, with women sometimes outnumbering men at conventions but you would not have known it from Hollywood’s output before this week. “That’s what we are rolling the dice on: are these women really going to come to see this movie? I suspect they are.”
PS The author Michael Lewis has sold more than nine million copies of 15 non-fiction books in 30 years including Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Blind Side, the last three of which were turned into successful films. He has written several screenplays, is a Bloomberg columnist and writes long pieces each year for Vanity Fair.
Yet, gallingly, he insists he doesn’t work that hard. “It’s funny how people say ‘Oh, you’re so productive,’” he tells me, sitting in his writing cottage. “I haven’t written a word in five months.”
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Then he remembers an exception. His ten-year-old son recently went on a school camping trip. “They had to be gold miners for a night and we were required to write them a letter from their early 19th-century family.” You suspect that young Walker Lewis won’t have forgotten the letter so quickly. His dad wrote about “how little we missed him, how we sold all his possessions, that we had eaten his pet rooster, [and then told him] to just stay out there and continue mining gold because it was selfish of him to leave”.
PPS Wonder Woman holds a rating of 93 per cent on the review site Rotten Tomatoes and provided it holds up at the box office there are follow-up superhero projects in the wings. Gadot and Jenkins are signed up to a sequel; Brie Larson is due to play the lead in Captain Marvel in 2019 and the Avengers director Joss Whedon is working on a Batgirl film. If they are all equally good they might even banish the memory of the female superhero turkeys Catwoman (2004) and Elektra (2005), with their Rotten Tomatoes average score of 9.5 per cent. Maybe. But probably not.