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Culture > Entertainment

Why Are So Many Female-Led Superhero Movies Flops?

Ariana Fromm
The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Tampa chapter.

On February 14, 2024, Madame Web came out. I was very excited to see it because It was an all-female-led superhero movie, and that doesn’t happen often. A week before seeing it, I was reading and hearing the comments about how bad the movie was. I was somewhat upset because it was something that I had been looking forward to seeing since hearing about Sony in talks about making it. I am a huge Marvel fan, so having a Marvel Universe female superhero was so exciting because the company did a project that little girls could look up to.

Walking into the movie theatre, I decided not to have high expectations of Madame Web (2024) because I didn’t want to be let down. When watching, I was surprised because I really liked the movie. Don’t get me wrong, there were some aspects of the movie that could have been better, but I thought it was a good movie, even though it was rated as a flop.

This made me think as to why so many women-led superhero shows and movies become a flop. There were movies like The Marvels (2023) and Catwoman (2004) that gained bad reviews. I liked these movies because, again, there aren’t many stand-alone superhero movies with females as the main characters.  

The Marvels is one of the most recent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie installments, and didn’t get great reviews. When watching the movie, I understood why because it seems more comical compared to the earlier phases like The Avengers (2012) or Iron Man (2008), but those are also mainly led by male characters. The Marvels is a movie, though, that has a good representation of females as well as minorities and gives little girls an empowering group of women to look up to.  

The movie Catwoman (2004) was a flop because it was nothing like the comics as well; the characters were over-sexualized to appeal to the male gaze, and the movie was not seemingly made for women’s empowerment.

The Avengers (2012) movie had a cast that was mostly made up of men except for one character, Black Widow. Even though her character portrays a powerful woman, the MCU has over-sexualized her to appeal to again, appeal to the male gaze. 

 I think that female-led movies would do better if people who work on these movies don’t focus more of their attention on how women look instead of how they can be portrayed on screen as powerful so younger generations can watch them and believe that they can be whatever they want.  

Ariana Fromm

Tampa '26

Ariana Fromm is a new writer for Her Campus at the University of Tampa. She enjoys subjects having to do with entertainment and traveling. Outside of Her Campus, Ariana is a sophomore at the University of Tampa, majoring in journalism with a minor in communications. She hopes that she can get into the sports writing industry and one-day cover sports such as tennis and hockey. Ariana enjoys playing sports such as tennis and basketball, as well as watching sports. She played tennis for 15 years, and even though she no longer plays it, she finds it to still be a big part of her life. She loves traveling, listening to music, writing, and watching films (mainly Marvel). She has also gotten more into reading since being in college and would love book recommendations.