Why are most movies that are rebooted with a female lead turning out to be flops?

Why are most movies that are rebooted with a female lead turning out to be flops?

Because they’re telling the wrong story.

There is a strong misperception that audiences, especially nerdy males, don’t like “strong female characters”. To which I say not only “hogwash”, but “are you fucking stupid”?

What I have observed in most of these reboots is that the biggest single selling point of the reboot is tits. But not, you know, “fun” tits. It’s not a “sexy” reboot, but a reboot where the the main draw is that it’s a story/franchise you already know, but now the main characters are all women!

Not only is that a boring premise, but it usually means that the writers don’t feel motivated to do a good job because they think having “strong female characters” is all the movie needs to draw an audience.

Here’s the problem. What they are giving us is strong female characters. What we want is strong female characters. And by strong I don’t mean “tough” or “men with tits”, I mean strong from a narrative perspective. Well written. Interesting. Multi-dimensional. And we’re not getting that.

The impetus to write these reboots, so far as it seems to me, is not because the writers and producers have a new and interesting story to tell, and the best way to tell it happens to be with female characters, but rather they don’t have a good story to tell, but either they’re ideologically motivated to appropriate an existing franchise from men for women to “fight the patriarchy”, or they just want to make money and think the shitty movie will do better wearing the corpse of an original male-led franchise.

You can see this nakedly when they blather on about “finally, a strong female character” in oh, say, Star Wars with Rey. Fuck me what? Bitch, did you forget about Princess Leia Fucking Organa?

You know, the badass who had the balls (ovaries?) to sass Darth Fucking Vader to his mask in front of his own men?

One of my favorite examples of this to touch on is Lady Ghostbusters. In the original, the central joke of the movie is that they’re conmen. At least Venkman was. And then it turns out that he was right all along, and now he has to deal with the consequences. In LGB, it wasn’t a scam, nobody believed them because they were silly girls but they were right all along! There was no reversal. No joke. The funniest part of LGB was watching Holtzman fuck off in the background.

You see, in most movies there’s the narrative before us and the meta-narrative. Take Star Wars. The narrative is the good guys fighting the bad guys. The meta-narrative is an homage to all these genre films about good guys fighting bad guys, be they spaghetti westerns, samurai films, or WWII movies. Star Wars does better when it doesn’t try to be Star Wars but tries to be a Western IN SPACE! or a Kurosawa samurai film IN SPACE!.

And the problem with many of these female-led reboots is that the meta-narrative is “fuck men, it’s women’s turn!”.

Even the reboot of Black Christmas or Charlies Angels, which are traditionally female led, still had that meta-narrative. And yes, all men were villains or meant to be seen as villains in the case of Black Christmas, or in the case of Charlie’s Angles either villains or non-”masculine” men.

Compare that to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, wherein Miss Elizabeth Bennet is a strong character, who fights zombies, and happens to be a woman. Or Mad Max: Fury Road, where we have Furiosa in a more masculinized “strong female” role, and the runaways in a more feminized “strong female” role. Fury Road doesn’t ask you to choose between being strong or female.

Hell, one of my favorite female characters growing up was and remains Evelyn O’Connell ne Carnahan. She may not be an adventurer or a gunfighter but she made being a librarian badass. So badass in fact that 20 years later she was the major inspiration for a character I’m playing in an RPG right now. That’s right, I’m a man, roleplaying as a female archeologist because I thought she was cool.

Reboots are always tricky. In the last five years or so there have been a ton of reboots, and most didn’t do terribly well. Hell, Star Wars wasn’t even a reboot exactly and people were of mixed reactions. So what I see is that someone comes along, takes a beloved franchise, decided that “it belongs to women now”, and makes a reboot. The reboot fails as many reboots do, and this one most likely because it was never a good story to begin with, because those in charge created the movie “because women!” rather than because they had an interesting story to tell, and when it flops they blame their failure on sexism. As if the only reason people wouldn’t like it would be because it stars women.

I find this especially galling in science fiction and fantasy films.

Do you honestly expect me to believe that people don’t like female-led movies solely because the stars are women? If you believe that, then you’re right, sexism is involved. But it’s not coming from us.

Reboot or no, we want strong characters. Male or female. We’re not the ones who have the problem with female characters. The people who think strapping tits onto the protagonist is all it should take to make a blockbuster are the sexists.

Lara Croft isn’t popular, for example, because she’s Indiana Jones but as a girl! She’s interesting because she’s her own damn character, and does not rely on being female to be interesting.

Do you know what the most ironic part of all this is? The real, fundamental reason that female-reboots often do poorly is because most of us have reached a point as a society where women doing “men things” isn’t particularly noteworthy or remarkable.

Simply being a lady astronaut or a lady cop or a lady Jedi or a lady what-have-you isn’t interesting. We have no problem with the idea of women doing these things. Which is precisely why the shoddy writing of many of these reboots is such a turnoff. It’s as if you tried to pitch a movie on the idea of “Get this, he’s a soldier, but he’s blonde!” That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?

Look, I get that when Star Trek the Original Series aired a black female bridge officer was a big goddamn deal. But Star Trek, very cleverly, didn’t make a big deal of it within the show, because in that setting, such a thing was so normal as to be beneath notice. Why shouldn’t an officer be black or a woman? And by the time I was watching ToS reruns as a kid, it wasn’t remarkable to me either, because why wouldn’t a black woman be able to be an officer? What could possibly be strange about that?

So that’s a big part of my personal irritation at female-led reboots. I feel as if they’re a gigantic step backwards. As if the people in charge of these movies think that I should be impressed that women can do things that I’ve known they can do since I was a child. And because “womyn power!” is the main draw of the film, the writing is shoddy, and then folks like me are loudly insulted for being sexist because we don’t like these poorly written films.

It’s worse when it’s clear that the reason it’s female led is because “it’s womyn’s turn now!”. That’s also shoddy writing and sexist. You don’t need to appropriate a successful franchise to sell us on female characters. What, do you not think women can lead spy films? Do you not think women can hold up her own franchise? You really think it’s better to appropriate Bond than to give us a new and interesting character? Dude, a woman held up not only her own franchise but the franchise of multiple A-list characters all by herself!

The best part of Batman vs Superman was Wonder Woman! She carried DC films on her own shoulders when Bats and Supes weren’t up to the task! So don’t you fucking tell me that we “don’t like female-led movies”.

Get your head out of your ass and write better characters and better stories, and stop blaming your failures on our imaginary sexism. Your movies flop because you can’t be bothered to do a good job with them, because your sexist ass thinks that “X but a girl!” is a good enough plot device on its own that we should break our arms patting you on the back for being so fucking daring.

Grow up.

We have.