Film School Rejects post - "Badly Written Spin-offs (Not Gender) Killed Female Superhero Movies"

I'm sure in the past on this blog we've addressed the dearth of female superhero movies.  For years, the excuse was that "Audiences don't go to Female Superhero movies," an excuse that seemed to fall in line with the "conventional wisdom" that female-driven action movies can't find an audience.  It's dubious logic at best, but it became common to see CATWOMAN paraded around as a contributing factor about why Warners was skittish about pulling the trigger on a WONDER WOMAN film.

This always felt like bullshit to me.  Even when a bad superhero movie salted the Earth on a particular property, usually a second chance was granted within a decade. (There was only about eight years between BATMAN & ROBIN and BATMAN BEGINS.)  Surely now that we're in a superhero renaissance, the old beliefs can be revisited?

More than that, if SUPERGIRL, CATWOMAN and ELEKTRA were being held up as the reasons no one was willing to take a chance on another female superhero movie, shouldn't a more thorough autopsy be performed on those movies?  Were those movies failures because they focused on women, or because they were simply objectively bad movies?  If a brilliant female superhero movie still failed to find audiences, maybe - MAYBE - the naysayers would have a point.  But if not...

To that end, I recently spent a week revisiting SUPERGIRL and ELEKTRA, and watched CATWOMAN for the first time.  The goal - find out what made these movies fail.

Head on over to Film School Rejects to see my post on why each of these movies fell short of expectations, in a post called "Badly Written Spin-offs (Not Gender) Killed Female Superhero Movies."