Hello, Peeps
Film auteur Elizabeth Banks is very mad at all you men and how you all swing your large privates in the air.
It’s your fault that Charlie’s Angels, the film which she wrote and directed, bombed at the box office this past weekend.
That’s right, not the bad reviews or the fact that audiences have shown that they are not interested in woke films and being forced a political agenda. It’s because you men are bad and not interested in seeing something with strong women.
The film, which was expected to be the woke action hit of the fall, debuted third at the box office with a pitiful haul of only $8.6 million, three and a half times less than Ford v Ferrari, which debuted at the of the box office with $31 million.
While promoting the film before its release she told the Herald Sun,
“If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”
The problem with that statement is that there have been plenty of films with strong female characters which men have not only gone to see but which they love. Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley in the Alien franchise is one example of this.
But she doesn’t end it there. She goes on to say that Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, two recent films with strong female characters which were global blockbusters, only did well because men viewed them as part of the larger male dominated superhero genre.
“They’ll go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre… So even though those are movies about women, they put them in the context of feeding the larger comic book world, so it’s all about, yes, you’re watching a Wonder Woman movie but we’re setting up three other characters or we’re setting up Justice League.”
Two things wrong with this statement.
First, she is blaming men for not showing up for her film, but it’s not just men who go to see movies, it’s also women, and not only did men not go see the movie, but so did the women who this film was supposedly made for.
Second, the people who made both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are female.
For someone who is supposedly trying to champion women and be an example of female empowerment, she sure doesn’t seem to mind taking away from the success of other women and marginalizing their work.
Banks is wrong about the franchise she tried to reinvent and men are willing to give Charlie’s Angels a chance because they did in the past.
The original two films were a hit and made nearly $300 million on a budget of $93 million. The second one, though not as popular, was still a hit and made $259 million at the box office.
The main difference between the two versions is that the originals were marketed as a fun time at the movies. Bank’s Angels was not.
The original versions also had Cameron Diaz starring in them, who at the time was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. The biggest star in the new ones is Kristen Stewart, who has no box office power and is best known for having the emotional range of balsa wood.
At the end of the day, it’s also incredibly hypocritical for Banks to claim to be woke and be for diversity because Banks had no problem contributing to Hollywood’s whitewashing by taking a role that was originally played by an Asian when she starred in Power Rangers.
I guess it’s just kind of easy to be selective and blame others for your own failures and inability to live up to expectations.