On a muggy day in spring I traveled a town over with a group of friends to the closest IMAX Theater near Johns Hopkins. Tickets in hand, 3-D glasses on face, we sunk into seats close to the front. It was my first time seeing Age of Ultron, and their third. I left the theater with mixed feelings. However, the rush of adrenaline and that did-you-see-the-Vision-OWN-Ultron feeling faded into a stomach-sinking emptiness I couldn’t name for days. It took looking through a Tumblr feed of movie reviews to grasp that underlying feeling: is that the best the women of Marvel are going to get?
While I loved the action sequences, Tony’s complex emotions, and the deft weave of the disembodied Jarvis into a flesh and blood Avenger, the shunt of Natasha’s sudden romance with Bruce Banner into a side plot in the complex narrative of the film hit me entirely the wrong way. When Tony Stark fell in love with Pepper Pots their relationship was built over Iron Man’s three-movie arc. When Thor and Jane Foster fell together they had, at minimum, all of Thor and Thor: Dark World to convince fans of their mutual attraction. Fans of The Avengers had spent months clamoring for a Black Widow movie with glimpses of her backstory and perhaps a hint of romance. We were instead given a hastily pieced-together narrative that used revelations of her childhood to create something that read more like a soap opera.
The insult didn’t stop there. When Marvel released their new line of toys featuring new action figures of the Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man, among others, Black Widow and the Scarlet Witch were not included in any of the merchandising. Wait, what? While the Scarlet Witch and her twin, Quicksilver, were villains for most the movie and thus the argument can be made that she shouldn’t be included among the other Avengers, this was arguably the movie most centered around Black Widow. We glimpse her training in the Red Room, she has an entire romantic arc on screen, although the strength of it is heavily up for debate, and yet she somehow doesn’t even get a mention on a t-shirt.
Why is this happening? Well, before people pick up pitchforks to attack director Joss Whedon, a lot of it boils down to the top executives and marketing strategies. See, the executives of major productions are focused on the marketability of each movie more than its actual contents. The best way to do this, in their minds, is to focus in on a specific demographic and pander everything to that. In the case of superhero movies, the anticipated desires of young boys wins out. Female viewership is considered non-essential or a drag on production costs. Welcome to gendered marketing.
Before anyone calls me paranoid, this is a documented issue that’s taken down many a popular cartoon or burgeoning new show. From Young Justice to Tower Prep, shows with high percentage of female views were actually cancelled due to anticipated loss in funds from toy sales. Paul Dini shed some light on this back in 2013 on Kevin Smith’s Fatman on Batman podcast when he spoke about problems executives perceived with female viewership.
DINI: "They're all for boys, 'We do not want the girls.' I mean, I've heard executives say this, you know, not [where I am] but at other places, saying like, 'We do not want girls watching this show.'"
SMITH: "WHY? That's 51% of the population."
DINI: "They. Do. Not. Buy. Toys. The girls buy different toys. The girls may watch the show—"
DINI: It’s like, ‘We don’t want the girls because the girls won’t buy toys.’ We had a whole, a merchandise line for Tower Prep that they s***canned before it ever got off the launching pad, because it’s like, ‘Boys, boys, boys. Boys buy the little spinny tops, they buy the action figures, girls buy princesses, we’re not selling princesses.’”
So apparently, girls don’t deserve to watch superhero movies and buy figurines of the women they adored from afar because it’s assumed they might not buy toys with the same frequency as boys. Apparently, things haven’t really changed since 2013.
The renewal of Agent Carter, a show centered around Captain America’s old love interest and other strong female leads, is a step in the right direction. But somehow, the lineup of new Marvel Cinematic Universe movies until 2019 has been released and not one is female-driven. Come on, you can do better than that. Give me a Black Widow movie not Ant Man. Give me the Scarlet Witch coming into her own as an Avenger. Give me a t-shirt with some estrogen-driven explosions. I’m waiting.
