Males dominate summer blockbuster movies, a hard fact The Avengers’ Scarlett Johansson recently sent up in a wicked Saturday Night Live spoof.

A parody trailer for a fake Marvel Comics rom-com, Black Widow: Age of Me, hasJohansson’s Black Widow character swooning for the robot villain of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the current box office champ.

A male announcer intones: “Does Marvel not know how to make a girl superhero movie? Chill! Marvel gets women.”

The sarcasm got loads of laughs and viral pass-arounds, but there’s bitter truth behind the joke: Hollywood doesn’t often let females star in its big “tent-pole” films. The reason? Male-dominated movie studios don’t believe female action movies make money.

In a confidential email last summer from Marvel Comics CEO Ike Perlmutter to Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, leaked online by WikiLeaks and Indiewire, Perlmutter named and excoriated three underachieving female superhero films: Electra (“very, very bad”), Catwoman (“a disaster”) and Supergirl (“another disaster”).

Perlmutter was conveniently ignoring the fact that many male-dominated films also tank at the box office. And he curiously didn’t mention the huge success of two current female-led action franchises: The Hunger Games, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Divergent, starring Shailene Woodley.

This could be the summer that changes such thinking and it could begin as soon as next week’s arrival of Mad Max: Fury Road.

It opens in theatres Friday, May 15, following its world premiere the day before at the Cannes Film Festival, and it comes hard on the heels of other “alpha female” performances at the movies: Johansson’s in Age of Ultron and Michelle Rodriguez’s in Furious 7. Later this summer we’ll see major female action characters in the likes of Tomorrowland (May 22), Terminator: Genisys (July 11) and Fantastic Four (Aug. 7).

But Fury Road is sure to set the bar high for what can be done with a jolt of estrogen in the testosterone universe of blockbusters.

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George Miller’s high-velocity reboot of his Mad Max action franchise, which originally starred Mel Gibson as the avenging Road Warrior in a post-apocalypse Australia, gets a new cast and one heck of a female presence.

Tom Hardy now plays the taciturn title anti-hero, Max Rockatansky, but all eyes will be on Charlize Theron’s aptly named Imperator Furiosa. She’s front and centre in online trailers and clips, kicking butt even harder than Max. You’d be hard-pressed to name a woman in any film, either superhero or regular scrapper, who fights as hard as Furiosa.

She’s also the main plot mover as driver of the War Rig, a mobile war machine stolen from Wasteland warlord Immortan Joe, a skull-masked creep played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, previously seen as the sociopathic villain Toecutter in the original Mad Max.

Furiosa is helping five women — played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee Kershaw and Courtney Eaton — escape the raping clutches of Joe, who enslaves “wives” as breeders for the male heir he desires. Joe and his skinhead War Boys followers are in hot pursuit and loner Max is forced to ally with Furiosa in they struggle to stay alive.

“You couldn’t have a man, a male warrior, stealing the five wives,” Miller told the Star during a Toronto interview this week.

“It would be a different story. It had to be a female. (Furiosa) arose out of that.”

Miller, who directs and co-writes, wanted Hardy’s Max to be in a “reduced state” in the film’s early going, reflecting the physical and mental hardships he’s endured in a world short not only of water, oil and gasoline, but also human contact. That’s another reason why Furiosa often looks the stronger of the two.

“Due to post-traumatic stress, Max starts off almost literally like a wild animal,” says Miller, 70.

“So he and Furiosa couldn’t have the same trajectory. He sort of grows out of (his PTSD), but she’s on her mission from the beginning.”

Miller had his female cast members consult with feminist playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), who has worked counselling rape victims in Central Africa.

“Eve Ensler was brilliant and made everything very real for us,” said Huntington-Whiteley, whose character Splendid, pregnant by rape, is the “wife” whom Immortan Joe is most determined to return to his harem.

“Splendid is the leader and an extremely strong character,” she says in the production notes. “She takes a maternal approach over all her sisters, but has conflicted emotions about her pregnancy. I did a lot of research on my own and had many conversations with Eve and George about how truly conflicted she would be about the child she’s carrying. She shows a lot of courage, but is often reckless, and I see that as an expression of the pain over what Immortan did to her and the possibility that she could still love the child.”

Putting women ahead of men is certainly not the conventional way of making a big summer blockbuster. That’s what appealed to Theron, who shaved her head and sprayed black makeup to make Furiosa look all the more furious.

“When George told me he wanted to create a female Road Warrior who can stand next to this very iconic character as his equal, I believed him and he didn’t let me down,” she says in the film’s production notes.

“The material allowed for two characters who don’t fall for each other, or even become friends, because there is no room for relationships in this place.”

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Miller didn’t make it easy on any of his cast, either female or male. Fury Road goes in big for practical effects, keeping computer-generated imagery to a minimum. There were stunt people to assist the actors, but a lot of real sweat was also expended by the marquee hires.

“Real people, real vehicles, real desert,” Miller says with a chuckle.

“And we don’t defy the laws of physics. It’s not a fantasy, it’s nothing supernatural, so we had no choice. I think if we did it as a green-screen (CGI) movie it would look very, very fake.”

Hardy, no slouch himself in the muscle department — he previously played the masked strongman Bane in The Dark Knight Rises — evidently found Theron to be a demanding but appealing co-star.

In the current issue of Esquire magazine, Theron talks about a gift that Hardy left in her trailer after Mad Max: Fury Road wrapped filming.

It was a Hardy self-portrait, backed with a red handprint and this inscription: “You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also f---ing awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.”

Says Theron: “We drove each other crazy, but I think we have respect for each other, and that’s the difference. This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand — there’s a real beauty to that kind of relationship.”

Theron turns 40 on Aug. 7, the age when Hollywood habitually puts female stars out to pasture. But if Fury Road proves to be the global hit it’s expected to be, there’s no reason why she couldn’t appear as Furiosa in future Mad Max adventures or even a spinoff series.

She can take pride in that and also smile at knowing that her portrayal of Furiosa is getting more advance raves than her current boyfriend Sean Penn managed before, during or after The Gunman, his failed bid earlier this year to attain action-hero status.

Fury Road also has extra estrogen in the way it was cut. It was edited by a woman, Margaret Sixel, who happens to be Miller’s wife.

“She didn’t want to at first. She said, ‘Why me?’” Miller recalls.

“And I said, ‘Because you’re not going to cut it like everybody else does in action movies.’ And she’s got this thing for those clunky lines which are forced in, that can only be said for the audience, they’re not being said between the characters. She’s got a thing against those. It treats the audience like they haven’t watched many movies before or something.”

Miller doesn’t consider it all that remarkable to have strong women in his films and his track record attests to this. While he’s never had a character as tough as Furiosa before, he did give pop star Tina Turner prominence as both singer and actor in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the 1985 conclusion of his original Mad Max trilogy with Gibson. And he directed The Witches of Eastwick in 1987, in which Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer get the better of a devilish Jack Nicholson.

“It wasn’t because it’s a feminist piece,” Miller says of having his wife, who also edited his family films Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City, put the blades to Fury Road.

“I just wanted someone who wouldn’t do that wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am cutting, just a lot of noise and movement. That’s when you’re not sure what’s happening and it just sort of hits you. If the movie was like that, it could a little bit too assaultive.”

Whatever the reason, the timing couldn’t be better. This may come to be known as the Summer of the Alpha Female at movie theatres, with Furiosa leading the charge.