Warner Bros is no place for leading ladies

[VanHelsing]

As far as I'm concerned, a leading lady by the name of Sandra Bullock has not let Warner Bros lose money. :p

[MovieWes]

Well, this just in...

Wonder Woman on Hold
Source: SCI FI Wire October 29, 2007

SCI FI Wire is reporting that the Wonder Woman movie being produced by Joel Silver for Warner Bros. has now stalled while the studio focuses on George Miller's Justice League and movies based on DC Comics' male heroes like Flash and Green Lantern.

Joel Silver, who was producing the now-stalled Wonder Woman movie, told reporters that the project has been placed on the back burner in light of another impending superhero film. "They're going to make the Justice League movie, and we're kind of pausing on Wonder Woman now," Silver said in a news conference while promoting Fred Claus. "Let them go ahead and do that picture [first]."

The Amazon superhero from the DC Comics series will be a major part of the upcoming JLA. "And if that comes together, Wonder Woman will be a part of that story," Silver said. "And then we'll see where we go from there. But we struggled with it for a while. I hope that we can solve it and make it one day."

[MovieWes]

Well, I guess this means that their Wonder Woman project is dead now. I also suppose that Hermione Granger is going to be cut from all future Harry Potter pics as well.

And if women are box-office poison, can someone explain to me why Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, Titanic, The Exorcist, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are among the ten highest grossing movies of all-time adjusted for inflation (not to mention Star Wars and Doctor Zhivago, both of which feature strong women in prominent roles)?

What total bullshit.

[OscarGuy]

Kidman had Moulin Rouge, The Others and the upcoming Golden Compass. Foster's had Flightplan, Panic Room and The Silence of the Lambs. So, these women are hardly failures.

[Big Magilla]

The point is that Davis in the 1930s and Crawford in the 1940s fought for and got better roles in better films that became box office hits, proving that there was box office gold for Warner Bros. given that women will go to see movies that appeal to them.

Today's female stars do not have that kind of clout. Blaming the failure of the insipid fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the unofficial remake of Death Wish on the fact that they had female stars is as ridiculous as the characters Kidman and Foster were given to play. Given the right property Kidman and Foster could make lots of money for Warners, they're just not getting it.

[OscarGuy]

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are hardly the role-models for feminine females.

[Penelope]

Apropos of our discussion of women in film; from Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood:

This comes to me from three different producers, so I know it's real: Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead".

This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster's The Brave One (even though she's had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman's The Invasion (as if three different directors didn't have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently. "Can you imagine when Gloria Allred gets hold of this? It's going to be like World War III," one producer just told me. (I put in a call to Glo, who comments below.) Of course, Warner Bros has always been male-centric in its movies.* But now the official policy as expressly articulated by Robinov is that a male has to be the lead of every pic made. I'm told he doesn't even want to see a script with a woman in the primary position (which now is apparently missionary at WB). Oh yeah, the fact that so many Warner Bros movies have been sucking at the box office for the last two years is all the fault of females. (Then again, Robinoff's poorly performing Superman Returns was criticized for its girlie-man portrayal of the superhero.)

As regular readers of my own box office reports know, chick flicks haven't been doing well at the box office lately. But Robinov's statements aren't about women's movies as a genre, they're anti Hollywood actresses. Besides, neither The Brave One nor The Invasion were classic chick flicks, either. "It's a phenomenal thing to say. What are we in the 1700s where women are back to being barefoot and pregnant?" a producer railed. "What's next -- fire all the Warner Bros women executives?"

UPDATE: Noted women's rights attorney Gloria Allred just gave me this statement in response to what I've posted above: "If that's what he said, when movies with men as the lead fail, no one says we'll stop making movies with men in the lead. This is an insult to all moviegoers and particularly women. It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men. Instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of judgment about which scripts to make, directors to hire and budgets to OK, some men in the movie industry find it easier to place blame for their lack of success on women leads and to exclude talented female actors from the top employment opportunities in Hollywood in favor of macho males. If that studio confirms that their policy is to now exclude women as leads, then my policy would be to boycott films made by Warner Bros."

*I presume Bette Davis and Joan Crawford would have something to say about that.