Last weekend, it wasn’t the brawny heroics of Dwayne Johnson‘s "Hercules" that topped the box office, it was the slick action of Scarlett Johansson‘s "Lucy" that audiences overwhelmingly chose instead. The movie opened to a massive $43 million, and it was the best debut the actress has had in her career to date. Clearly, moviegoers don’t care about the gender of who’s kicking ass, and yet, when it comes to the Marvel-verse—where ScarJo is a utility player as Black Widow—it’s still mostly a "bros only" club.
While yes, there are women in prominent roles—Zoe Saldana as Gamora in "Guardians Of The Galaxy"; Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill in "The Avengers"; Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in the upcoming "The Avengers: Age Of Ultron"—it’s the dudes who lead the movies. And so when asked point blank by Comic Book Resources about when a female led Marvel movie might arrive, Kevin Feige essentially said the studio is still waiting for the right moment.
"…I think it comes down to timing, which is what I’ve sort of always said, and it comes down to us being able to tell the right story. I very much believe in doing it. I very much believe that it’s unfair to say, ‘People don’t want to see movies with female heroes,’ then list five movies that were not very good, therefore, people didn’t go to the movies because they weren’t good movies, versus [because] they were female leads. And they don’t mention ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘Frozen,’ ‘Divergent.’ You can go back to ‘Kill Bill‘ or ‘Aliens.’ These are all female-led movies," Feige said.
"It can certainly be done," he continued. "I hope we do it sooner rather than later. But we find ourselves in the very strange position of managing more franchises than most people have — which is a very, very good thing and we don’t take for granted, but is a challenging thing. You may notice from those release dates, we have three for 2017. And that’s because just the timing worked on what was sort of gearing up. But it does mean you have to put one franchise on hold for three or four years in order to introduce a new one? I don’t know. Those are the kinds of chess matches we’re playing right now."
So, it seems like Feige is either playing coy—one of those long distance release dates must be a female led movie….right?—or it’s really not in the immediate cards. But in Marvel’s defense, on the small screen, they are giving Hayley Atwell‘s "Agent Carter" her own show starting in 2015. So that’s one step in the right direction, but we’ll see how long it takes for their big screen universe to follow suit.