Play Our Way or Get Out: Hollywood’s Persistent Message to Women

I have a problem with female reboots. I have a problem with reboots and remakes and adaptations anyway—especially in the video game category, where quality is compromised for dollar signs—but I particularly find issue with female-led reboots. They fundamentally send the wrong message to women in Hollywood, and to girls the world over.

As striking as the first statement might sound, I started with that declaration because the alternative was to tiptoe around it—I’m hoping you’ll stick around to find out why I dislike them so much (I promise it won’t take long). And I’d also like to point out that I’d defend the recent Ghostbusters remake with my last breath. It’s not the women in women-led reboots I have a problem with, after all: it’s the men behind them.

Picture this, if you will: a boy is happily playing in a sandpit, building a castle and pretending his knights are defending it. The game doesn’t have to be that, but we’ll go with that for now. A little girl then joins him, but rather than welcome her to build her own creations or play her own games, he tells her she has two options. They are either to play his game, his way, or to get out of the sandpit.

Female reboots—whether people have realised it or not—send a similar message to women writers, women directors, women actors. Rather than providing the support, encouragement, and backing to flourish and create their own fantastic stories or put their vision to film, or play interesting and complex characters, Hollywood would prefer if women used their films—the toys, in the above analogy. That way, they still have some control over what they’re doing.

As pointed out by my friend Betti in our discussions on the subject, this attitude also insinuates an underlying assumption that women simply aren’t up to the task of creating strong, blockbuster-worthy narratives–instead they must be content with recycling ideas, though we know that not to be true having witnessed the praise around Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman.

To the outside world, there’s the impression given that women are being supported by Hollywood, that they’re being given these fantastic opportunities and representing women everywhere in doing so. But dig a little deeper, and you see that they’re instead being robbed of creative freedom. Little girls are being told that there are rules to their creativity and that they can be creative if they follow the lead of men. Nothing, then, has changed.

Thankfully, there are pockets of resistance out there, supporting female talent in Hollywood and beyond. The 2017 horror anthology XX, for example, brought together a showcase of female talent in a series of terrifying tales, whilst Amy Poehler has been known to support young women with her Smart Girls project. In TV land, Doctor Who’s newest season will see female scripts appropriately brought to the fore, and actors such as Carey Mulligan have made it clear that TV is strides ahead of film in terms of interesting roles for women.

It’s disheartening, however, that even in a time where we recognise our own lack of diversity and the rot within Hollywood, women are still stuck playing in the shadows of male-centric legacies. Perhaps it might be time to build another sandbox, for creativity’s sake.