"Charlie's Angels", "Ocean's 8" and "Ghostbusters Reboot"all bombed in box office. There are several competing theories as to why this has happened. Some cite the films' lack of star power. Others point to a 'reboot fatigue' among cinemagoers. Some of the more feminist reviewers have aired their disappointment that, while the films are more feminist take, it doesn't do enough to shake the original show and previous films.
However, the main factor here is clearly the lack of public interest in 'feminist' remakes. As the saying goes, if you go woke, you are surely going for broke.
These three recent films like all sold purely off the back of their female-led cast and (in some cases) female-led crew, failed to attract an audience. And some have inevitably claimed this is because we live in an inherently misogynistic society.
Indeed Elizabeth Banks, who wrote, directed, produced and starred in "Charlie's Angels", had this excuse lined up before her film was even released. 'If this movie doesn't make money, it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don't go see women do action movies', she said in an interview.
She even had an answer for why "Wonder Woman" and "Captain Marvel", which both have female lead characters, were major hits:
The more mundane truth here is that the whole concept of this feminist "Charlie’s Angels" reboot is fundamentally flawed. It wants to keep the silliness of the original TV show and be a modern high-tech spy thriller, and it wants to make feminist points along the way. Inevitably, the po-faced feminism of the film sucks the life out of the silliness and the thrills.
The 2000 version of the "Charlie’s Angels" movies worked because the stars – Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu – made fun of themselves.
They knew they were playing ludicrous characters and embraced this. The new Angels, by contrast, are humorless and woke – adept at lecturing, sneering and putting down unreconstructed men. And no one – male or female – wants to be condescended to during their afternoon out at the cinema.
This points to an underlying problem with today’s feminist identity politics. It tries to understand social relations almost solely through the prism of gender relations. And when this theoretical model oversteps its boundaries and starts to inform how culture is made, it creates untruthful, uninvolving and banal art.
In this schema, individuals are reduced to an identity – one based not on their totality, but on only a small part of who they are. This inevitably makes for shallow, two-dimensional films, in which identity, rather than busting ghosts or carrying out heists, drives the plot and motivates the characters. Reducing people to identities turns fictional characters into unrelatable caricatures.
Even films like the all-female "Ghostbusters" reboot – in which the individual performances are human, engaging and often hilarious – are in the end nullified by this reductionist framework. These films also tend to feature lots of clunking expositional dialogue, which expresses the filmmaker’s agenda rather than the characters’ inner life. People instantly recognize this as bad storytelling.
However, the main factor here is clearly the lack of public interest in 'feminist' remakes. As the saying goes, if you go woke, you are surely going for broke.
These three recent films like all sold purely off the back of their female-led cast and (in some cases) female-led crew, failed to attract an audience. And some have inevitably claimed this is because we live in an inherently misogynistic society.
Indeed Elizabeth Banks, who wrote, directed, produced and starred in "Charlie's Angels", had this excuse lined up before her film was even released. 'If this movie doesn't make money, it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don't go see women do action movies', she said in an interview.
She even had an answer for why "Wonder Woman" and "Captain Marvel", which both have female lead characters, were major hits:
"[Men will] go and see a comic-book movie ... because that's a male genre. So even though those are movies about women, they put them in the context of feeding the larger comic-book world. Yes, you're watching a Wonder Woman movie, but we're setting up three other characters or we're setting up Justice League."Whether or not men are as simpleminded as Banks suggests, her explanation doesn’t account for why her film’s target audience – young, empowered women – have also stayed away from the cinema.
The more mundane truth here is that the whole concept of this feminist "Charlie’s Angels" reboot is fundamentally flawed. It wants to keep the silliness of the original TV show and be a modern high-tech spy thriller, and it wants to make feminist points along the way. Inevitably, the po-faced feminism of the film sucks the life out of the silliness and the thrills.
The 2000 version of the "Charlie’s Angels" movies worked because the stars – Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu – made fun of themselves.
They knew they were playing ludicrous characters and embraced this. The new Angels, by contrast, are humorless and woke – adept at lecturing, sneering and putting down unreconstructed men. And no one – male or female – wants to be condescended to during their afternoon out at the cinema.
This points to an underlying problem with today’s feminist identity politics. It tries to understand social relations almost solely through the prism of gender relations. And when this theoretical model oversteps its boundaries and starts to inform how culture is made, it creates untruthful, uninvolving and banal art.
In this schema, individuals are reduced to an identity – one based not on their totality, but on only a small part of who they are. This inevitably makes for shallow, two-dimensional films, in which identity, rather than busting ghosts or carrying out heists, drives the plot and motivates the characters. Reducing people to identities turns fictional characters into unrelatable caricatures.
Even films like the all-female "Ghostbusters" reboot – in which the individual performances are human, engaging and often hilarious – are in the end nullified by this reductionist framework. These films also tend to feature lots of clunking expositional dialogue, which expresses the filmmaker’s agenda rather than the characters’ inner life. People instantly recognize this as bad storytelling.
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