This Was Supposed to Be the Year of the Female Movie Hero

After that, none of the anticipated female-led tentpoles—not Black Widow, not Wonder Woman 1984, not Eternals—made a big-screen splash.Theoretically, this should mean that everything is just delayed a bit, that next year will be the Year of the Woman (Doing Hero Shit in Movies). When it looked like 2020 was going to feature not only a Harley Quinn vehicle but also a new Wonder Woman film and the (long overdue) Black Widow standalone Marvel movie, it seemed as though this might be the year that showed what a 12-month calendar full of superheroines looked like. Hollywood had already learned, thanks to Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, that movies fronted by women could make money (duh), and in 2019 some 43 percent of the top-grossing films featured a female lead or co-lead, according to a report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. (It also makes the days with more superhero movies starring people of color seem like distant dream, especially considering the passing of Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman earlier this year.)And those are just the movies that are, essentially, in the can.