A couple of days ago, Warner Brothers released the second trailer for its upcoming comic-book-based blockbuster-in-waiting Wonder Woman. This is a fully-realized, big-budget feature film by the director of the Academy-Award-winning film Monster (though perhaps notably, not much else), which will be in theaters less than a year from now. And if the trailers are any indication, it promises to be one hell of an action-packed movie.
Now, since Marvel/Disney pioneered the concept of a shared cinematic universe for several of its characters with The Avengers, the studio has gone from strength to strength. Kevin Feige and his army of directors, writers and producers have successfully launched four solo properties (Iron Man, Cap, Thor, Ant-Man), two team properties (Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy) and the first, and so far, only, interconnected cinematic world. Other companies have taken notice, such as Universal Studios, and have tried to replicate the formula, but as the saying goes, "often imitated, never duplicated."
For all of that, however, there has been an underlying "safeness" to a lot of the decisions that Marvel's head honchos have taken in their filmmaking approach, and I might as well get right to it: all their lead actors so far, ALL of them, no exceptions, have been white, straight, Caucasian males. I don't really consider myself a gender or racial equality activist, and I can honestly say I wouldn't raise a hue and a cry if an LGBTQ character never anchors a superhero movie (though Marvel's openly gay Wiccan character is brilliant), but I raise this point to offer a bit of a reality check to this claim that Marvel are somehow especially brave in their filmmaking choices. Once upon a time, that was true, right up until The Avengers scored a record $207 million on its opening weekend at the North American box office. Since then, every single film has been made in accordance with a set of core specifications. The good news is that it's a formula that allows filmmakers quite a bit of creative latitude, and has resulted in several very enjoyable films, but it's still a formula.
What's sad about this is that one can see strong female characters sprinkled throughout the MCU, from Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow to Zoe Saldana's Gamora to Evangeline Lilly's Wasp, and there are hundreds more from Marvel's comics catalog, but thanks to the likes of Ike Perlmutter, who reportedly blocked the idea of female-led Marvel movies for years, citing 1984's Supergirl and 2004's Catwoman as his arguments, they've always remained stuck in the back seat.
Wonder Woman's journey to the big screen has been, as in the case of many high-profile comic-book adaptations, a troubled one. Arguably the most high-profile attempt to bring her to the big screen involved no less than Avengers director Joss Whedon, who had proposed to make the film a period film set in World War II, which didn't pan out. In fact, production for the current iteration of the movie only finally fell into place two years ago, twelve years after Spider-Man became the first movie in history to gross more than $100 million in North America on its opening weekend, six years after Iron Man proved that Marvel could produce a movie without the backing of a major studio (with Paramount only distributing) and two years after The Avengers became the first movie in history to gross more than $200 million in North America on its opening weekend. In short, in the time it took for WB/DC to get their act together and decide to make a Wonder Woman movie, Disney/Marvel could easily have come up with a fantastic movie featuring any of a number of rich, multi-dimensional female characters, but it didn't. With their hard-won clout and credibility Kevin Feige and his crew could easily have beaten WB/DC to the punch at a true landmark: the first female-anchored superhero movie.
To rub salt in the sound, Marvel's first female-anchored movie, Captain Marvel, is over two years away, even though the actress who will play her, Brie Larson has already been cast.
People will debate the quality of Disney/Marvel films versus the quality of WB/DC films; art is an inherently subjective experience shaped by experiences and biases, but it cannot be debated that WB/DC beat Disney/Marvel to a significant comic-book-movie milestone.
What hurts me, as a Marvel fan, is that they had every opportunity to do it first but because of a nauseatingly sexist head honcho (or a bunch of them), it didn't happen.
I'm happy to report to those that don't know that Perlmutter is no longer running the movie division of Marvel Studios.
Now maybe we can see some real diversity, and not just some contemptuous tokenism.
