Lemme get this straight: I’m an alpha male of Christendom with tunnel vision, but without an imagination, who maligns the few because I think I own the cultural centre, all because I don’t enjoy Marvel/DC movies?? Right? You do know how ridiculous that sounds, don’t you?

I think you also failed to understand that this article is about the other wonderful female-led dramas currently showing.

Mike Frost, it’s a pity to see an intelligent conversation start with ‘I haven’t seen it and I’m not going to’. Never a good idea to open a debate or discussion with so little knowledge about the subject you are going to run down. Go take a look at it. Then talk. It’s a better perspective I think.

I think you failed to understand that this article is about the other wonderful female-led dramas currently showing.

I. did. not. tell. anyone. to. ignore. Wonder. Woman.

The acclaimed science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin wrote a beautiful reflection on the value of sci-fi and fantasy precisely because it enables us to examine the human condition in ways that realistic fiction does not (it’s the introduction to A Fisherman of the Inland Sea). She writes:

“I don’t accept the judgment that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives. Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are images and metaphors of our lives, legitimately novelistic, symbolic ways of saying what cannot otherwise be said about us, our being and choices, here and now. What science fiction does is enlarge the here and now”

The best Superhero movies do this, too, I think.

Ok. So I’ve gone looking for some stats. These are the most detailed I’ve found (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/australia/?currency=local&yr=2017&p=.htm). Let me know if you’re referencing others. What they show is that there was a 25% increase in the weekend box office takings on Wonder Woman’s first week over the previous week. While Wonder Woman is doing well, it only took $AU6.8mill on its opening weekend. That’s less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2 a few weeks earlier, which took $AU15.7 million or The Fate of the Furious which took in $AU12.7 million a few weeks before that. Beauty and the Beast was released a few weeks earlier and took $AU13.1 on it’s opening weekend and is, so far, the biggest grossing film of the year (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/australia/yearly/).

I truly believe there is an interesting story to tell about heroines in film, and where we look for them. I think telling women to ignore Wonder Woman is misguided.

In making the argument that attendance at Wonder Woman is going to prevent Hollywood from making nuanced dramas about complex female characters, I think we’d need to see figures on the expected takings against actual takings for the three movies you reference and I can’t find that data anywhere. My Friend Rachel was only released on June 8 and there’s no box office data available yet.

Your argument also seems to suggest that it’s a zero-sum game; we can only have a certain number of movies about women, and that if we watch the action blockbuster, we won’t get the complex dramas. I think that’s contestable. If Wonder Woman had tanked, I think it would have put female-directed and female-led movies back far more than its success will do. Just because there are lots of male superheroes doesn’t mean there’s a dearth of complex male character dramas. It doesn’t have to be either or.

I’d love it if lots of women got to go and see all these movies. They sound great.