As the director of The Avengers and its upcoming sequel The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Joss Whedon has worked within the Marvel machine for the last five years. But the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator wasn’t afraid to criticize the movie studio, or the film industry at large, for its “intractable sexism” and “old-fashioned, quiet misogyny” when asked about gender inequality at the multiplex.
Two months before DC (finally!) announced a Wonder Woman movie and Marvel responded with a Captain Marvel adventure, Whedon was questioned about the dearth of female superheroes on the big screen. Whedon was admirably blunt in his response: “It’s a phenomenon in the industry that we call ‘stupid people.’” He continued, “There is genuine, recalcitrant, intractable sexism, and old-fashioned, quiet misogyny that goes on.”
“There’s always an excuse,” he said. “You hear ‘Oh, [female superheroes] don’t work because of these two bad ones [Catwoman and Elektra] that were made eight years ago.’”
Citing The Hunger Games — whose sequels Catching Fire and Mockingjay — Part 1 were the highest-grossing films of 2013 and 2014 — as proof that there’s an enthusiastic audience out there for ass-kicking girls and women, Whedon then urged his own studio to do better: “Marvel is in a position of making a statement simply by making [a female-led] movie, which I think would be a good thing to do,” he said. “But it has to be a good movie, [and] it has to be a good character.”
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[via Digital Spy]
