Yahoo Lifestyle Marvel’s CEO Doesn’t Think Female Superheroes Work
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow in Avengers. Image: Disney.
Remember those leaked Sony emails from last year? They’ve hit the headlines again after an email sent by Marvel Entertainment CEO, Ike Perlmutter, to Sony executive, Michael Lynton, last August, has come to light.
The email appears to be a follow-up to a phone conversation between the two men and bears the blunt subject-line “Female Movies”. In it Perlmutter describes Elektra (the 2005 film starring Jennifer Garner) as “very, very bad” at the box office; Halle Berry’s Catwoman as a “disaster” and the 1984 release Supergirl (a film about Superman’s cousin) as “again, another disaster.”
The email was discovered after Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood blog went digging in Wikileak’s database of more than 170,000 leaked Sony emails. According to Vulture, “[Sony] was reportedly mulling a movie starring a female character in the Spider-man mythos, so it’s not unreasonable to assume the phone conversation had something to do with that initiative.”
While Marvel did go on to announce plans for its first female-led superhero movie in October (Captain Marvel), this film is not slated until 2018.
Meanwhile, the reboot of Wonder Woman (due for release in 2017) was dealt a blow recently when Emmy Award-winning director Michelle MacLaren (of Breaking Bad fame) announced she was leaving the project.
We can only hope that when these two films are finally released that box office earnings proves Marvel wrong. Very wrong.
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