Women as Action Heroes (Mild Spoilers)

Last year was a banner year for films starring strong women: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was the top grossing movie in the United States and Canada, besting testosterone-fueled fare such as Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel, and Frozen, a refreshing Disney movie about princesses who don't need Prince Charming to be happy is one of the year's top-grossing films. The acclaimed blockbuster Gravity, not only celebrated of the strength of women but featured a bravura performance by its lead star Sandra Bullock, who carried the movie almost entirely by herself, even as she carried another femme-driven movie, The Heat, earlier in the year with co-star Melissa McCarthy.   Even the films that weren't anchored by women featured some pretty bad-ass female characters, like Iron Man 3, featured Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts kicking ass and taking names, The Lord of the Rings: The Desolation of Smaug, which actually introduced a new character to the Tolkienverse: the orc-slaying she-elf Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly, and Fast and Furious 6, in which real-life MMA champ Gina Carano got to strut her stuff.

But really, it's Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen and Sandra Bullock's Ryan Stone who have really ripped up the form book on women as action stars, hearkening back to the glory days of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, which basically means it's taken Hollywood roughly a quarter of a century to figure out what James Cameron knew ages ago: that women are completely and utterly credible as action heroes and people will pay to see them in these roles. Anyone who doubts it need only utter the words "get away from her, you bitch" to any one of the millions of self-respecting nerds to whom studios almost always pander when dreaming up their next big-budget, billion-dollar hopeful, and see if he gets the reference.

There's not much else to say that the numbers aren't already saying by themselves, but now that Hollywood seems to have realized that women can actually sell movies while doing a heck of a lot more than fawning over sparkling vampires, maybe we'll see the return of strong female heroes in the mold of Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling from 1991's Silence of the Lambs (although preferably not an actual remake considering we've had waaaayyy too many of those) who basically uses her brain to win the day rather than kung fu.