Scientific formula or not, your statement was ...
If the movies suck it won't make money. If they're good, they will.
And that is simply wrong. You can make excuses all you want and find reasons about kids and China or whatever but fact is a bad movie can still make money, lots of money while you say that if it sucks then it won't make money.
And on the other side of things, a good film doesn't always make money. There are lots of examples of this. You can base "good" or "bad" via your opinion or RT, doesn't matter, the statement is wrong.
I'm specifically talking about a reason for making or not making a female superhero movie. Nothing has changed from then and now.
A lot has changed. Men and women roles still aren't equal but there is a reason women action films are being made in masses now. I am not saying it is right but that is how it is in Hollywood. There are exceptions like Aliens but they are far and few in between for a reason. It's a trend just like anything else, you see some get some success then you start looking more into it and greenlit more of those films. This is Hollywood and they will go with what makes them money. Before it didn't make them money, some had to do with bad decisions or bad scripts but there also stands a reason why that is.
I have no doubt Whedons work would be better but to think like it will be a guaranteed hit and to think that Catwomans flop didn't play a role is just being naive. Sadly, that is a world we live in. Yes bigger risk bigger reward but you have to take the right one. WB took that risk with Halles popularity after winning the Oscar and being in XMen (which was a big hit back then) and it flopped. Studios will always look at that and base their decision on it especially if Whedons script was submitted at the same year.
And I get it, to you Whedon would have been a great choice based on Buffy alone, but that is to you, not to WB. All I am saying is I can see where WB are coming from and if you do not see it that way then I don't know what to tell you.
Again, a woman action flick is already difficult to get made and with those flops happening in the same year, it would be double/triple difficult for Whedon to get over that hump. That is how the business works, same way Singer had to shoulder the old failed Superman films budgets and it piled on to SR and made it look like a bigger failure than it really is. Is it fair for Singer? No! Did he create a good film? No but w/o that bigger budget added on to his film then SR would be considered more of a success.
If you doubt it, then just google articles about women starring in action flicks and how and why it is trending these days. Some parts from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/02/brave-prometheus-female-action-heroes_n_1625712.html
In fall 2009, movie producer Nina Jacobson was faced with a classic Hollywood dilemma -- to pitch or not to pitch.
Jacobson's colleague, Bryan Unkeless, had recently recommended a young adult novel he thought would make a good movie. Jacobson told The Huffington Post that she loved the book and "couldn't put it down, couldn't stop thinking about it."
She said that although she knew the movie would be expensive to make, it would be difficult to sell to the studios for another reason -- it was an action movie starring a female protagonist.
"She's 16-years-old in the book, and she's not defined by her romantic interest -- it's not a love story, though there is a romantic subplot. So in terms of the movie marketplace, it breaks a lot of the conventional wisdom about what works," Jacobson said.
But Jacobson won the approval of the book's author and sold the package to Lionsgate, which gave the movie a budget of $70 million -- just a fraction of the amount given to action tentpoles like "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises."
That all these movies were released in such quick succession is no coincidence. Instead, it marks the culmination and convergence of trends that have been emerging in the movie business for several years.
The most important such trend, according to Jeff Gomez, co-founder of movie marketing company Starlight Runner, is "the growing knowledge that women are making the decisions now with regard to entertainment choices and product choices."
From:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...male-led-action-film/251678/?single_page=true
For many years, there were even fewer opportunities for actresses in another genre: the action movie. It's long been accepted in popular culture that that the traditional "action film" is the gender-reversed mirror image of the "chick flick": a film made by men, starring men, for men. But today sees the release of two new action movies that don't conform to that rule. There's Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, which has garnered mostly positive reviews. And there's Underworld: Awakening, the fourth film in the only major "vampires vs. werewolves" franchise that isn't called Twilight, which isn't being screened for critics at all (its predecessor, 2009's Underworld: The Rise of the Lycans scored a measly 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). Despite the differences between the two competing releases, they're both torchbearers of a promising, relatively new genre trend: the era of big-budget action movies starring women.
There are more to read in those links, if you guys got time but to think that nothing has changed is crazy. Those two articles simply talk about the rise of action films led by women and that is the change in itself. Roles are still not equal in front and behind the camera (
http://time.com/3419411/women-led-blockbuster-successes-havent-killed-movie-gender-gap/) but there are more opportunities now. and studios are more open to it.
You simply cannot say nothing has changed. Whether better scripts are being turned in and they weren't before, that is change. Whether people are more open to watch them now than before, that is change. Whether the increase in writers and directors jumped from 5% to 9% in the past few years that helps get these films greenlit, that is change.
9 percent of the top 250 movies at the domestic box office last year were made by female directors. That’s substantially higher than the 2011 figure of 5 percent.
Via:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/movies/female-film-directors-slowly-gain-ground.html?_r=0
No matter how minuscule the differences are, that is still change. You can't say none of these things- trend or not, marketing change or not, hype or not, - had anything to do with todays popularity of female led action films because it obviously does. Those are changes in the industry.
I also agree about this:
That's not to say, of course, that an adapted action film starring a woman need be terrible; Hollywood's two recent attempts to make a female-led superhero movie—2004's Catwoman and 2005's Elektra—have been dismal failures, but they were failures not of concept, but of execution
But again, you have to see where some would be reluctant to make films that these male CEOs obviously do not understand. They genuinely thought putting Halle in a skimpy catsuit will bring in big bucks. That is the sad part but that way of thinking has changed, not as much as it should be but it had changed and that is something that has changed. You can't say WB is the only one who had this train of thought when the movie industry has had about ~50 years of history of it being true? To stop thinking that way is change.
And yes I am emphasizing the word "change" because there is change. You can't say that nothing has.
This is complete bull **** and quite frankly pretty shocking and limited thinking by you.
Well i concede to that, it was an exaggeration on my part, same way you exaggerated that if a film sucks it wont make money.
Not all are written by women but it is no coincidence that Twilight and Divergent and Hunger Games are all written by women. That was what I meant.
Saw the first Transformers and couldn't make it through Dark of the Moon.
