Female comic book fans are used to waiting.
It’s what they’ve done for over a decade, gamely supporting countless Batman reboots and Spider-Man series; filling theater seats for the likes of Iron Man and Captain America. Women, in general, have modified their cinematic tastes over the years, acclimating to an industry that doesn’t always consider them a high priority when choosing which franchise to boost next – an industry that, up until a few years ago, seemingly couldn’t fathom the idea that a woman might double as a comic book nerd.
And then, Wonder Woman happened.
The film by Patty Jenkins – while not technically the first female-fronted superhero property to grace a screen – marked a huge step forward in the fight for equality amongst the preternaturally-powered-vigilantes-in-spandex set. While Marvel had been churning out crowd-pleasing ensemble-driven romps for years, they’d only allowed women a piece of the action, saving the headlining spots for the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth. Despite having robust plot potential with established characters like Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) and Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch), sequels to already-cemented storylines were the bread-and-butter they were feeding audiences. At one point, the studio bumped back the release of a planned Captain Marvel outing a few months (along with Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther project, which jumped from 2017 to 2018) in favor of yet another Spider-Man entry after snagging the ability to bring the web-slinger into their universe. But DC – a studio still struggling, in many ways, to find a voice that separated its heroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe crew – managed to beat their rivals to the finish line. They handed Jenkins the reigns, propelled a fairly unknown Gal Gadot to superstardom, and introduced a novel concept: women superheroes sell.
Fans who had been clamoring for better representation on screen finally had Gadot’s Diana Prince, an Amazonian descendent of gods whose compassion and belief in humanity fueled her superhuman abilities. Soon, Marvel’s Captain Marvel would follow, giving movie fans an introduction to Carol Danvers, a woman underestimated her entire life, who finally socks it to the patriarchy (literally) – on Earth and in space.
Sure, within the world of TV, women had been wearing capes and kicking ass for a while. From Linda Carter’s early days to more recent CW fare like Legends of Tomorrow and CBS’ Supergirl (a character that also got a solo film in the ’80s with Helen Slater in the lead), the small screen seemed more willing to experiment with genre – in terms of its heroes and its audience. But the idea that major studios would take (what they perceived as) a risk on female-fronted film franchises in this modern era was a longer time coming, and one that has sometimes had its share of stumbles (Wonder Woman: 1984), scrapped solo outings, and unwarranted backlash from a smaller subset of the fandom.
That pushback, coupled with Hollywood’s historical tendency to throw in the towel on planned diversity investments the minute a film’s projected box office numbers begin to dip, is what makes this renaissance of female-led superhero stories so exciting, hopeful even. It’s as if, with the success of shows like WandaVision and Hawkeye, and the long-awaited genesis of that solo Black Widow film, fans are finally seeing the fruits of their labor – and by labor we mean the unimaginable effort it’s taken to not rail at the lack of comic book heroines on screen for the last 10 years.
Take WandaVision, a show that likely would’ve been impossible to get made a decade ago. It’s a story about a grieving witch with superpowers who accidentally holds an entire town hostage in an alternate reality she’s created to live out a fantasized existence with her dead lover. Who the hell was pitching that in the Marvel boardroom back in the day? WandaVision expertly blended the best tropes in genre storytelling, packaging them for TV and using the medium to elevate the arcs of characters who never fully got their due on the big screen. Creator Jac Schaeffer was allowed to experiment with Wanda’s story – playing with different decades, testing shooting styles, introducing new heroes – in large part because Wanda’s abilities were so unique and her background was so singular that the possibilities in terms of plot were limitless. Even the wildest twists and most bizarre interactions on the show work, not in spite of the story being told from a woman’s point of view, but precisely because Wanda is a supernaturally powered heroine who’s suffered and lost her way.
The same can be said for Black Widow. Scarlett Johansson put years into the character, finding tiny moments of introspective study while battling alien invasions in Midtown and managing the male egos of her fellow Avengers in films like Civil War. It took the world ending – quite literally – along with a tragic sacrifice for Marvel to finally give us a glimpse of who Natasha Romanoff was away from the Avengers compound. Helmed by Aussie director Cate Shortland, the long-awaited Black Widow solo-film might have been a flashback (you know, to the days when the character was still ALIVE) but it eschewed treading old ground by focusing solely on Natasha’s other found family – the one she thought she’d lost to the Red Room years earlier. By highlighting the character’s unbreakable bond with her sister, Yelena (Florence Pugh) and her “parents” Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weiz) and the Red Guardian (David Harbour) shed invaluable light on a woman whose mysteriousness was her defining trait for too long. Natasha’s driving motivation throughout the film – to destroy the place that traumatized her as a child and to liberate the women still held captive there – felt decidedly feminist but, even more importantly, it reflected a woman’s growth, from victim to survivor to a needed catalyst for change.
That’s what so many of the new superhero projects with women at the forefront seem to be doing – spotlighting these characters in a way that celebrates the things that make them different from their male counterparts without shying away from the realities of what being a woman – even a mind-bogglingly powerful one – entails. We saw it with Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman, and we’re still seeing it with shows like Hawkeye as Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop fights to prove herself to her mentor (and her mother) and with Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman in The Batman. Whether you’d dub Selina Kyle a superhero or not, she is the only character in the film that feels on equal footing with the man in the cowl and her arc – from a young woman forced to survive on the streets, catering to men who view her as a commodity, to a vigilante seeking revenge, to the woman who saves the hero in the end (in more ways than one) – felt surprisingly fulfilling.
And with the success of these films and TV shows, fans of female superheroes only have more women kicking major ass to look forward to. From Nia DaCosta’s next entry in the Captain Marvel series to a spinoff focused on WandaVision’s antagonist Agatha Harkness, Taika Waititi’s new Thor film handing the hammer to Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, more of the Dora Milaje in the Black Panther sequel, Batgirl, Ms. Marvel, and the possibility of more Harley Quinn, likely in a Gotham City Sirens project, the future suddenly looks bright for women who have been waiting their turn for long enough. And, as long as these movies and shows continue to place characters above multiverse timelines, fleshing out everything that makes these women so compelling as superheroes, the wait will have been worth it.