Transcription
Women don't want to see other women saving the men in the story. It gives them the ick. It gives men the ick. It gives all of us the same ick that we get when we watch a woman propose to a man.
>> And now the Estrogen Network presents Afternoon Yak. >> Man >> cancelled.
I'm gonna say something controversial and I don't even know if I like what I'm about to say. Like, this is going to be controversial even for me because first and foremost, I am a lover of good storytelling. I am a lover of good stories, of good characters, good dialogue, good action. And so I, I don't discriminate against anything except whether to say it's good or bad. That being said, I am really, really not trying to be sexist when I say this, but I think it's time to end the female action hero experiment. I think it's time to end the female superhero experiment. I think it might be time to stop making these kinds of movies.
I'm not saying we can't have female action heroes. I'm not saying women can't be the protagonists, to be the leads. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that women should only be relegated to the love interest or to the side characters and that the hero's journey is reserved exclusively for men. I'm not saying any of that because we've gotten really great, strong, actually strong female characters in the past. I know that we can do it again, but something isn't working here and I think that it's time to press pause, figure out what audiences actually want, and then come back to it. This just isn't working. People don't want it.
No, don't like that. >> These movies, they're plagued with girl boss issues. They're badly written. They're generic. And then the actors and the studios keep picking fights with the male audience. It's becoming this vicious cycle where they put out a movie that nobody really wants or asked for. You have a big degree of a male audience who comes and, you know, dings the trailer or dings the movie, which then sparks this backlash between the female protagonist and the audience that she's kind of meant to be winning over. And then nobody really wants to go see the movie and it tanks at the box office. And we keep doing this again and again and again and it's exhausting.
And the other part of it too is that Hollywood is now running out of places to point the finger. They have to stop pointing the finger at these male audiences because the male, male audiences are the only ones who would be showing up. Like, check this out, you guys. This is an article from Vulture. "Just how badly did Supergirl flop?" And it calls specific attention to the problems with the demographics for this movie. It says, "It's easier to point to noxious fandoms as a catalyst for Supergirl's soft entrance into the DCU. Over the past half-dozen years, women-fronted superhero movies, Madam Web, Birds of Prey, The Marvels, they've been dogged by fanboy vitriol. And Craig Gillespie's true grit-esque space western is no exception."
So, right off the bat, they're admitting they can't keep pointing the finger at these demographics. They're saying it would be easy to. But here's the other thing. Even if it was the whole reason why a movie succeeds or fails, you would think that they would just start making movies for that demographic. But if they don't want to, if they're stuck on the message, right? You would think that you would make a movie that is so good that it would overcome all of these objections. Because my experience with male audiences is that they don't care as much if it's a woman protagonist or a man protagonist. They just want to go see a good story. They will go see movies with female protagonists as long as the story is good. But these movies aren't good. And so it's just proving them right over and over again. And you're just picking fights with them instead of fixing the root of the problem.
But then the article continues, right? It says, "Warner Brothers executives admitted that they were surprised by the ferocity of the backlash to Al Cox's Supergirl, even if their industry peers weren't expecting the film to hit every demographic quadrant. 'I just don't see a bunch of teenage guys going, hey, want to go see Supergirl?' says one longtime industry observer." Sorry. No. So, you were already off the bat making a movie for a murky demographic. You cannot blame the male fanbase at this point. You know that. They know that.
And now we have the real kicker of this article, you guys. "The problem seemingly wasn't entirely the male fans. Available demographic data shows that 59% of the opening weekend audience was male and 65% over the age of 25, which means Al Cox's demographic, Gen Z women, did not show up as Warner anticipated."
>> Hey, where the white women at? >> Yeah.
So, the real reason that Supergirl flopped wasn't because of an all-male vitriolic fanbase. It is because the demographic that they created Supergirl for, this Gen Z women demographic, didn't give two flying craps about this horse trash movie. So, what are you going to do now, Hollywood? You can't go and yell at these women for not showing up to the movie that you supposedly made for them. Cuz I got to tell you, as long as I have been alive, I cannot recall a single time where yelling at a woman turned out to be a good idea. So now you're stuck. You're stuck because you keep trying to make a product for which there is no demand.
Look at this. Let's go back and let's look at the box office performance of some of these big superhero woman protagonist movies in like the last 10 or so years. You know, you've got, you start off with Wonder Woman in 2017. That was a huge hit. Then you had Captain Marvel, also a huge hit. But let's be honest, I feel like there was a little bit of that Avengers momentum behind that movie. I'm just saying. And then all of these subsequent movies, you got Dark Phoenix, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 84, Black Widow, The Marvels, Madam Web, Furiosa, Supergirl. I'm probably missing some in here. They're all like bombs or underperforming or a complicated release. No clear winners. No emerging victorious movies really after Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. They're just not hitting.
Because when we talk about movies that are made for the male demographic and movies that are made for the female demographic, there's a lot more overlap in interest for movies that are written for men. Women will go see movies that are written for men. Men don't really go and see movies that are made for women. That just doesn't happen. You have a lot more women who are going to go see Superman than you have men who are going to go see The Notebook. You want to know the franchises that women care about that speak directly to women? Twilight, 50 Shades of Gray, that Colleen Hoover "It Ends With Us," Acatar, Manacled, which is basically this Harry Potter Handmaid's Tale fanfiction where like Voldemort has won the war and all of like the muggleborns are subjugated and Draco Malfoy kind of like owns Hermione Granger and they fall in love. I'm not making this up. Like, this is this is what women are into. Are we sensing a pattern here? Like, do I have to say it out loud? These movies aren't hitting. They're just not hitting. Nobody cares about this because you're writing female superheroes to take the place of male superheroes or male action heroes. That is turning men off. At the same time, you're not really telling a specific or unique story that women would be interested in. The way that Wonder Woman was kind of centered around a love story to begin with, you're not giving the female demographic anything that they want out of it. You're just telling the male story, except you're swapping out the man for a woman. That doesn't make women suddenly interested in your story.
>> It's going to be "Save by the Prince," and she's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be. >>
This isn't just me being a pick-me or saying that men make better stories or it's better to watch a male lead and just have the girl be the love interest. I'm not trying to say this just to gain some popularity points. I'm really trying to put my finger on why we're seeing movie after movie with a female action lead just bomb over and over again. There's only so many times you can blame the audience when after a certain point, it's just not the case. You're just making these films for no one, for no demand. And the evidence is right there in the fact that no women went to go see Supergirl. No women cared. People will line up to see James Bond do whatever. They won't line up to see a woman do the same thing. It's just nature.
At a certain point, I can't even wrap my head around it. I can't explain it to you guys. It's just that it's clear that the demand isn't there from men or women. I, I really think that you could write an absolute bonkers superhero movie with a woman in there in place of a man and it still isn't going to do the same. It's just not going to have the same appeal. But here's the thing. The, the movies aren't even good. There's barely any good movies nowadays, let alone good female-led movies. We're not getting anything of substance hardly at all. The best they're giving to us is The Mandalorian and Grogu. That's it. It's slop. It's actual slop.
You know, if you set out to write a story about your average suburban mom whose child gets kidnapped and is like, now being human trafficked, and you wrote a John Wick style movie of her just like burning down the world to get to her child, I think that would be a movie that both men and women would turn up to watch. And, and even that still falls into a stereotype, right? It still falls into a trope of like, the protagonist has to be a nurturer. She has to be a mother. But these are the stories. These are the characteristics that appeal to women. What is going to make a woman go and watch a movie where a woman kicks a whole bunch of ass and takes some names because she cares about something that she has to take care of, that she has to save? Not about her saving the whole day. Just generically saving the whole day.
And they do this. You see that they know that they're being generic, but they, they're, they're doing these little things that they think appeal to women because, just as an example, right guys, Supergirl's dog, Krypto, was an dog. I hate that dog. I was reading that in the actual comics, Krypto is Superman's dog, his loyal pet, not Supergirl's. James Gunn made Krypto Supergirl's dog. And you want to know why, guys? Because they wrote that in going, "You know what? Gen Z and millennial women love dogs. They don't want to have kids. They just want to have dogs." Like, it's so obvious. It's insulting. This is what women like. They know. We're just going to write a story about her helping her dog because women love dogs. It's so insulting. And it's, this is a bigger function of the reason why these movies aren't hitting.
>> Put a ticket and make her gay. >>
I, I don't think women want to see other women save the day. Women don't want to see other women saving the men in the story. It gives them the ick. It gives men the ick. It gives all of us the same ick that we get when we watch a woman propose to a man. You can do that. Nothing is stopping you. If that's what's going to bring you joy, go for it, I guess. But like, I think I'd rather eat drywall. You know what I'm saying, you guys? Like, I would rather walk across hot coals for like an entire mile. I would rather count every single blade of grass in the United States. Like, I have no interest in doing any of that. And I think the, the proof is in the pudding here that women don't want to see that. Men don't want to see that. And so, we're not getting these organic stories like we should be getting them.
There are just some roles that are meant for men. Proposing, paying on the first date, keeping the family safe, doing the heavy lifting or the hard labor, uh, keeping chivalry alive. Like, there are just things that we kind of like know innately. And we say that it's societal, but I think it's really more biological that there are these natural roles that women want to play and that men want to play. And there is no appetite for seeing that role reversal play out on screen.
You know, I, I'm, I'm genuinely wrestling with this a little bit, you guys. Like, I'm genuinely struggling with how I'm wrapping my head around this data, around the fact that there is no demand for these kinds of stories because I'm not like some sort of trad. I'm not a person who wants to restrict the kind of stories that are available to women. But it's clear that there is an element, a repeating pattern in each of these stories that is keeping people's interest at bay.
And I think if you're going to write a story with a central female protagonist, you have to do two main things. If you want to attract the female demographic, you have to give your lead character a distinct psychology and a distinct objective, a distinct story to tell for her. It cannot be James Bond in a dress. Women don't care about that. They care about this girl who's just graduated college and she's struggling to figure out the real world on her own when all of a sudden her sister gets kidnapped, right? Or, you know, she falls, she falls into some kind of plot where she has to rescue one singular person or one type of thing. You get what I'm saying? That in order to attract the female demographic, you have to let them know who that specific woman is and the kind of situation that she has got herself into. She herself specifically.
And then if you want to attract the male demographic, you're going to have to let men. You just have to. She cannot overpower every single man in the story. She can't outsmart every single man in the story. If the male is useless, if he's not there to serve a purpose, to help her, to make himself better, men aren't interested. They are interested in stories where they see themselves and they see the best version of themselves. The same goes for women. They are interested in stories where they see an idealized version of themselves. And so if you don't create those strong men characters around your female protagonist to help guide her, to help mentor her, to intimidate her, right, like Hannibal Lecter did to Clarice Starling, you, if you don't have any kind of strong male character in your movie, men aren't going to be interested. If you don't have a distinct person for your main character and someone for her to help, women aren't going to be interested.
So, I just think that's where it lands for me. We have to stop making women the central characters just because it's not working. Something has to change here. And unless something does change, you're just going to continue on with this pattern of there being no demand for the movie to begin with and the actors in the studios picking fights with the audience that would otherwise maybe go see it. But these are just my thoughts, my rambling, incoherent thoughts. Please let me know what you guys think in the comments. Am I on to something here? Am I just kind of being a pick-me? Feel free to bash me, but if you like this video, please like, hype, and subscribe so that you can get more of my content. Thank you so much, everybody.