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Geek Out: Sony will beat Wonder Woman and Black Widow to the big screen with a female-led superhero movie

“Where is our Wonder Woman movie?” the internet has been crying for many a year. “Where is our Black Widow film?”

DC Entertainment shrugged and continued to churn out Superman and Batman movies. Marvel Studios smiled wanly and held up a single finger, signaling that we should just be patient; these things take time. And so yesterday, Sony Pictures jumped the line and said, “Hey! Over here! We’ll make you a female-led superhero movie in the Spider-Man universe! We’ll make it first!”

And the internet hollered, “Hurrah, probably!”

Since the beginning of time, Hollywood studio executives have been bamboozled by the notion that people with vaginas enjoy watching movies as much as people with penises. “A fluke” these execs call it when vagina-havers pay a lot of money to watch other vagina-havers act out stories on the big screen. But a weird thing happened last year. A weird thing called “math.” Math said that in 2013 “movies with a female protagonist earned 20% more on average than movies with a male protagonist.” Vagina-havers and penis-havers shoveled out billions of dollars to see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Frozen, Gravity, The Heat, Epic, and Saving Mr. Banks. But whoops! Math also said that even though movies with female leads earned way more money than movies with male leads, only 16 out of the 100 top-grossing films of the year featured women in a leading role.

And now, in 2014, Salt, Wanted, and Lucy are raking in so much money and buzz that Hollywood studio executives have no choice but to pull their hair and stomp their feet and shout “Fuck, fuck, fuck” while looking for someone to blame for their decades-long stupidity about people with vaginas.

Seriously, can you imagine being the guy at Marvel that kept pushing back a Black Widow solo movie and then watching Scarlett Johansson’s Lucy bring down almost $90 million in ten days?

Anyway, here are the sparse details on Sony’s plan, according to Deadline:

Having pushed the next installment of its Spider-Man franchise out of 2016 and into 2018, Sony Pictures is doing a top-to-bottom revamp of its most important property, insiders say. And that includes a female superhero movie which is being eyed for a 2017 release date.
The way Marvel’s movies are licensed is super weird. Fox owns the X-Men universe; Sony owns the Spider-Man universe; and Marvel Studios owns everyone else. So Sony’s choices are pretty limited when it comes to a female superhero.

Black Cat is one option. Her real name is Felicia Hardy, and you might remember her as Harry Osborn’s assistant in this year’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I don’t think it’s likely that she’ll get the call because she’s a little too much like Catwoman. Silver Sable would be an interesting choice; she’s a mercenary who often finds herself at odds with straight-edge superhero types. Obviously we’ve got Spider-Woman, who has never seen the live-action screen but was definitely a fan favorite in her solo cartoon series and in Iron Man’s cartoon series. I’d prefer classic Spider-Woman to the new Peter Parker clone Spider-Woman. Firestar is another interesting choice, but I’m not sure who really owns her; she debuted in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends but she has also been a part of different X-Men and Avengers stories. Maybe she could just exist without Mutant powers?

I’m cautiously optimistic about Sony’s project, but way more excited than I am for Zack Snyder to bring his legendary sexism to bear on Wonder Woman.

How do you feel about it? Which character do you think Sony should adapt for the big screen?

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