Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood is happy about the year’s take of strong female roles but wishes some of them had gone to grown-ups:
Looking at the numbers this is actually a good year for female roles at the box office. According to box office mojo as of today, three films with a female protagonist are in the top ten grossing films of the year: The Hunger Games, Twlight Breaking Dawn Part 2 and Brave.
This is all good news.
But digging a little bit deeper the one thing that I notice about all these movies and all these characters is that they are all GIRLS. So my question is, where are the movies about strong WOMEN?
If I haven’t before, let me now go on record as saying that I remain pessimistic about how women will fare on film in the near future. Most blockbusters starring strong young women are adaptations of existing properties, and development executives tend to learn the wrong lesson from those successes (i.e., “More vampires!” rather than “More strong women!”)
The notable exception here is Brave, which was produced by Pixar, a gang of notorious risk-takers. They might actually represent our best hope for the kind of movies Silverstein wants to see.