Sarah Michelle Gellar has some words for all the Marvel fans out there that continue to tear apart films that feature a female cast of heroes. I guess she’s been seeing a lot of that these days, and in a recent interview with The Guardian, she said:
“Genre is where women can really succeed and hold an audience. Every time a Marvel movie tries to do a female cast, it just gets torn apart … Unfortunately, audiences weren’t as accepting. There’s still this mentality of ‘the male superhero’, this very backwards way of thinking.”
Well, for me, I grew up on badass female heroes like Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner in Terminator 2 and Sigourney Weever’s Ripley in Aliens. There are a lot of great, awesome women heroes that have been represented in films over the years, and when the characters are cast well and the story is strong, those movies work, and they’re great!
When it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are a lot of awesome female heroes that the fans have enjoyed including Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, which fans wanted to see get her own solo film for years until Marvel finally made it, and it was great!
There’s also Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlett Witch, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, and there are so many more! The only one I’ve ever really seen fans complain about is Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel because some feel she was miscast.
I think for the most part Marvel fans enjoy seeing woman heroes in action! As a father of three daughters, I certainly appreciate it! Regardless, if the hero is male or female, the most important aspect of a movie is getting the story right.