Joss Whedon is well known for creating strong female characters, most notably Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. But just because he has had success with such characters, it doesn’t mean that he wants to be the only one to do so and the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anyone else who has followed his lead has him upset.
Speaking with the Daily Beast, Whedon expressed his displeasure with a studio system that doesn’t see the profit in putting a female superhero on the big screen.
Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”
I have no doubt that part of Whedon’s irritation stems from his working on a Wonder Woman film for Warner Brothers that never got made.
Given that Whedon has confirmed that the super heroine Scarlet Witch will be in Avengers 2, perhaps that will inspire more filmmakers, and more importantly more film studios, to not have their female characters be token sidekicks but at the forefront of the action.
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