Elizabeth Banks, actor and director, says on the success of Superhero movies specifically female superheroes:
"They’ll go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre. So even though those are movies about women, they put them in the context of feeding the larger comic book world, so it’s all about, yes, you’re watching a Wonder Woman movie but we’re setting up three other characters or we’re setting up Justice League."
I agree with what she is saying, it almost seems like the companies that make the superhero movies made female superheroes just chose to include females in their films and to be able to say that their films are diverse and not all male.
I agree with Banks when she gives the success of the movies on female superheroes to the already established superhero world that already has a large fanbase like Avengers and Justice League. If the films on female superheroes where stand alone movies unconnected to these huge universes, would they have been such a huge success?
Banks later goes on to relate this topic to her own movie that she is both directing and acting in, Charlies Angels as she says "If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies."
Additionally, all the original superheroes are designed and created by men, so they are created by men, for men. And, none of the Justice League or MCU Universe open with a movie about a female superhero, it is only many many many years later after their fan base is highly established that they decide to make a film on a female superhero- almost as if they do not want to risk loosing their fan base in the early stages by creating a female superhero film so they wait until their fanbase is much larger.
It’s my thought that although these characters are females, they were created by men for men’s comic consumption. What would female superheroes looked like if they were created by and for women?