Action-Adventure Films With Female Leads Are Succeeding at the Box Office

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Catching Fire is the highest-grossing Thanksgiving-released film in history, making $110.2 million over the five-day holiday. It pulled in the fourth-highest gross of any second-weekend box office ever, after The Avengers, Avatar, and The Dark Knight, two of which are superhero movies.

The fact that this sci-fi film starred a woman and conquered the box office isn’t a fluke: Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, opened in October and so far has grossed $250 million domestically and $615.5 million worldwide, outperforming even Catching Fire abroad.

The Best Movie Stars, Right Now, Are Women

The recent difficulty of casting the male lead of Fifty Shades of Grey led Variety and other news outlets to bemoan the lack of young leading men who can be relied upon consistently at the box office. While the industry continues to scout for the next Brad Pitt, smart studios can take advantage of the stars that they do have: women.

Between the first and second Hunger Games films, for example, Jennifer Lawrence proved herself to be a bona fide box-office draw with the affection of the masses. Her paycheck for the first installment amounted to a relatively paltry $500,000, despite her Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone. A few years later (with a Best Actress win under her belt), she pulled in $10 million for Catching Fire as an image of her, alone, smoldered on the posters that blanketed the country. The movie studio reaped the rewards at the box office. If 2011’s X-Men: First Class came out today, Lawrence’s character Mystique would be featured in the advertising far more heavily than she was at the time. People will clearly pay to watch Jennifer Lawrence as a steely underdog, and people will pay for superhero movies. Would they really turn away from her if she wore a cape?

Lawrence isn’t alone in her ability to anchor a blockbuster. Sandra Bullock has had enormous recent success with both Gravity and action comedies, but has never played a superhero. Scarlett Johansson’s star power could certainly attract audiences to see her Avengers character The Black Widow in a standalone picture. Young actresses like Shailene Woodley and Chloe Grace Moretz have both been cast in roles that play with ideas in the sci-fi genre, but there has been no talk about a tentpole superhero feature for either of them yet. Television is exploding with skilled, tough actresses: Scandal’s Kerry Washington or Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany could vanquish evil with flair. Another excellent possibility is Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, who is rumored to have already met with Marvel. These actresses are assets, and deployed correctly, could prove highly effective.

Catching Fire Has Crossover Appeal, and So Do Superhero Movies

A lot of industry execs have long assumed that a sci-fi action-adventure movie starring a man has universal appeal, while a film in the same genre starring a woman draws mostly women. As The New York Times reports, “Many box-office analysts have viewed The Hunger Games as a successor to Twilight—an extremely popular movie series, but ultimately one with limited appeal to certain demographic categories, particularly men.” In an interview about upcoming Marvel films, Stan Lee demurred when asked whether Black Widow would be given a solo film like most of her teammates. “Well, probably at one time," he said. "They’ll make a movie of the Black Widow. The thing is the women like these movies as much as the guys, so we don’t have to knock ourselves out to find a female ... but we will.” That's right: A film with skintight-leather-clad Scarlett Johansson punching people would be Marvel having to "knock" itself "out"—not cashing in on an obvious way to get both men and women in the theater.