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Have you noticed something… strange happening at the multiplex lately? It feels like every few months, we get the same news cycle on repeat. A big-budget movie starring a fierce, capable female action hero hits theaters. It’s a spin-off of a beloved franchise. The critics say it’s pretty good! The audience scores are decent! And then… crickets. The box office numbers roll in, and it’s a ghost town.
The recent spectacular bombing of the John Wick spin-off, Ballerina, feels like a bad case of déjà vu. It’s the same story we just saw with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Both were well-received films with female action leads, no major controversies, and yet they both underperformed, leaving studios scratching their heads.
News articles are quick to point out the trend, often asking, “What happened? Didn’t audiences used to love female action stars?” They’re right! We all remember Angelina Jolie practically building a career on it with Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Salt. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor are Mount Rushmore-level icons. Heck, “Girl Power” and “Girlboss” weren’t ironic insults; they were celebratory phrases!
So, what went wrong? Why has the well been so thoroughly poisoned that even a good, well-written female-led action flick can’t get people into seats?
I think we’ve reached a critical mass, an endgame for years of Hollywood getting it wrong. The problem isn’t that audiences hate female characters. The problem is that audiences have grown to distrust how Hollywood writes them. A specific, destructive, and frankly lazy storytelling trope has been run into the ground, and it’s taken everyone—male characters, female characters, and the audience’s goodwill—down with it.
Let’s dive into how we got here, why it’s a disaster for everyone, and why you shouldn’t feel bad for pointing it out.
The “Swap and Demote” Formula: Hollywood’s Self-Destructive Trope
To understand the current backlash, you have to see the pattern. It’s not a conspiracy theory when the evidence is hiding in plain sight, especially at the House of Mouse. For nearly a decade, a particular formula has been deployed with alarming frequency:
- Take an established, beloved male-led franchise.
- Introduce a younger, more energetic, and often instantly proficient female character.
- To elevate the new female character, diminish, embarrass, or outright assassinate the legacy of the original male hero.
- The end result? The male character is left broken, sad, or sidelined, while the female character takes his place.
This isn’t about passing the torch. Passing the torch implies respect and a continuation of a legacy. This is more like snatching the torch, using it to set the original torchbearer’s house on fire, and then complaining that no one wants to come to your party.
The Early Warning Signs
If you want to trace this back, the much-maligned Ghostbusters (2016) is a common starting point. But the trope was refined and deployed more subtly in places you might not expect.
Remember Cars 3 (2017)? It’s a genuinely well-received movie about an aging Lightning McQueen struggling to keep up with a new generation of racers. His goal is to prove he’s still got it. He trains with a talented young female trainer, Cruz Ramirez. Throughout the film, he improves, he rediscovers his mojo… and then, in the final race, he just… gives up. He pulls into the pit and lets Cruz finish the race for him, finding a new purpose as her mentor.
On its own, it’s a sweet story about aging and finding new purpose. But it was the first major example of a male protagonist’s entire arc being subverted to literally put a new female character in the driver’s seat. It flew under the radar, but the template was set.
Then came The Last Jedi later that year, and… well, we don’t need to re-litigate the whole Luke Skywalker situation. But it’s safe to say it fits the pattern to a T.
The Pixar Puzzles: When Character Development Goes Sideways
Pixar, the gold standard of storytelling, wasn’t immune. Two sequels from this era stand out as particularly baffling examples of this trend.
First, Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018). The heart of the first film was the beautiful friendship between Ralph and Vanellope. In the sequel, Vanellope finds a new, exciting world she wants to be a part of. Ralph’s fear of being alone causes him to act in possessive, toxic ways. The film’s solution? Vanellope gets to follow her dream and live in a cool new place, while Ralph is left to go back home, alone, having learned the lesson that he needs to let his best friend go. The ending, despite attempts to sugarcoat it, felt like a real downer. Vanellope’s journey was elevated, while Ralph’s character was regressed into a toxic stereotype, only to end up in a sadder place than where he started.
Then there’s Incredibles 2 (2018). I was so excited for this movie! A sequel was completely justified! And they fumbled it spectacularly. The plot rehashes the first film: superheroes need good PR. This time, Elastigirl (Helen) is chosen for the job because Mr. Incredible (Bob) is seen as too destructive.
This sets up two arcs. Helen rediscovers her love for hero work and is incredibly successful. Bob, sidelined and jealous, is stuck at home with the kids and completely falls apart. He’s depicted as utterly incompetent, overwhelmed, and miserable. The film constantly juxtaposes Helen’s soaring success with Bob’s crushing failure. You keep waiting for a resolution, a moment where they come together and address this massive divide in their experiences. But it never comes. The most we get is Violet telling her dad he’s “super.” Bob’s entire emotional arc is left unresolved, making him look like a bumbling, sad-sack husband next to his hyper-competent wife. Again, the female character soars while the male character is dragged through the mud.
The Franchise Assassins
These earlier examples were just the warm-up act. The trope went into overdrive with Disney’s flagship properties. We saw it with Obi-Wan being upstaged in his own show. We saw it in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which spent most of its runtime portraying Indy as a washed-up, sad old man, only to have a last-minute reversal that felt tacked on.
The most blatant confirmation of this institutional mindset came from the behind-the-scenes drama of the Blade movie. During its troubled production, reports revealed that Mahershala Ali’s Blade had been relegated to the fourth lead in his own movie! The story had morphed into a tale about his daughter and her friends, with Blade as a grumpy supporting character. It got so bad that the star was ready to walk, forcing a total rewrite.
When this pattern is this consistent, you have to bury your head in the sand to deny something is going on. This isn’t an accident; it’s a creative mandate. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the old Hays Code or the Comics Code Authority—a rigid set of unspoken rules that hampers storytelling to push a specific, and in this case, incredibly toxic, message.
A Toxic Recipe: Why This Hurts Everyone
The defenders of this trend will immediately jump to one conclusion: anyone who dislikes it is just a misogynist who hates women. But that’s a lazy argument that ignores decades of film history and the very real consequences of this formula. This “Swap and Demote” strategy is a lose-lose-lose situation.
1. The Male Characters Get Shafted: This one is obvious. Legacy characters like Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and countless others are dragged out of retirement not for one last glorious adventure, but to be told they’re old, wrong, and in the way. It’s a cynical move that alienates the very fans who made these franchises popular in the first place.
2. The Female Characters Suffer, Too: This is the most tragic irony. In the quest to create “strong female characters,” they forgot to make them good characters. So many of these new heroines are written as one-dimensional Mary Sues who are perfect at everything from the start. They lack vulnerability, they have no real arc, and their “confidence” often reads as smug narcissism. Instead of being characters we root for, they become symbols of a corporate agenda. This doesn’t empower anyone; it just creates resentment towards the very characters you’re trying to promote. Women in the audience don’t relate to them either—the box office proves it!
3. The Audience Checks Out: After almost ten years of this, audiences are tired. They’ve been conditioned. They now see a trailer for a female-led action movie and their brains automatically connect it to this negative pattern. Their guard goes up. They assume the male characters will be idiots, the female lead will be flawless and smug, and the story will be a lecture.
So, even when a movie like Ballerina comes along—which, by all accounts, treats John Wick with respect—it doesn’t matter. The trust is gone. The excitement for seeing a female action hero has been replaced with suspicion and fatigue.
Dodging the Real Issue: It’s Not the ‘Who,’ It’s the ‘How’
Even industry commentators who see the problem are scared to talk about it. On her YouTube channel, Grace Randolph of Beyond the Trailer danced around the term “M-She-U” when criticizing Marvel’s direction for the new Fantastic Four movie, which is rumored to be a “Sue Storm movie.” She correctly identified the problem—the feeling that female characters are “pushing out” the male characters rather than joining the party—but was squeamish about naming it directly, likely for fear of attracting the wrong kind of crowd.
And she’s not wrong to be cautious. In this heated online environment, of course there are actual misogynists who use this legitimate criticism as a cover to spew genuine hate. But their existence doesn’t invalidate the core argument. In fact, the studios facilitate that toxicity. By creating this divisive, gender-based conflict in their stories, they encourage audiences to think in terms of “us vs. them,” destroying the universal appeal that makes great characters timeless.
We should be able to relate to a character’s struggles regardless of their gender. But when stories are built around tearing one gender down to prop the other up, you force the audience to pick a side. It’s a cheap, manipulative, and creatively bankrupt way to tell a story.
Can We Ever Go Back? The Damage is Done
This brings us to the future, and it looks bleak. Think about the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. In the comics, Sue Storm is an incredibly powerful, complex, and central character. A movie focusing more on her is a fantastic idea with plenty of source material to back it up! Ten years ago, fans would have been thrilled.
But now? After everything we’ve seen? When we hear it’s a “Sue Storm movie” and see a casting choice for Reed Richards that seems to lean into a more cowering, background role, we can’t help but be suspicious. We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends: with an assassinated male character and an artificially elevated female character that we’re supposed to applaud. The trust is broken.
The same goes for the X-Men. For decades, the X-Men comics of the 70s and 80s were famously centered on powerful women like Storm, Jean Grey, and Kitty Pryde. An X-Men movie that puts them front and center would be the most comic-accurate thing Marvel could do! But if they did it today, it would be met with a wave of backlash from an audience pre-conditioned to see it as another “Swap and Demote” ploy.
That’s the real damage. This trend hasn’t just produced a string of bad movies; it has poisoned the well for future stories, making it nearly impossible to tell female-centric stories without triggering the audience’s hard-earned distrust.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
It seems like the big studios, particularly Disney, are kamikaze pilots determined to go down with the ship. If the historic failure of The Marvels didn’t convince them to change course, nothing will. They will die on this hill of tearing down their own iconic male heroes out of some bizarre, behind-the-scenes grudge.
So what’s the answer? Maybe it’s satire. I’m holding out a sliver of hope that the announced Spaceballs 2 will be the breath of fresh air we need, gleefully mocking the absurdity of these modern movie tropes.
But the real answer is that we, the audience and the creators, need to do it ourselves. We need to support and create stories with characters that feel like people. Human beings with flaws, strengths, and relatable struggles, regardless of their gender. Stories that aim to entertain, inspire, and unite us, not divide us with petty, toxic grievances.
The current industry seems broken beyond repair. But creativity isn’t. It’s time to build something new, one great, human story at a time.