“Hanna” Director Joe Wright Slams “Sucker Punch’s” Girl Power, Spice Girls: ‘That’s Marketing Bullshit’
On the heels of the grossly underperforming movie Sucker Punch, which dropped 68% its second weekend and has grossed only $29M on an $82M budget, here comes another punch its way. From Movieline:
In San Francisco to present his upcoming teen assassin thriller Hanna at WonderCon, director Joe Wright threw a few pointed barbs toward Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, calling out the film’s brand of scantily clad feminism. Speaking exclusively with Movieline, Wright elaborated on the subject, tracing the “alarming” brand of sexually-exploitative girl power found in Sucker Punch back to the Spice Girls.
“For me, one of the main issues in terms of womens’ place in society and feminism is the sexual objectification of women,” Wright told Movieline in Los Angeles before presenting his latest film, Hanna, to the WonderCon crowd on Saturday. “That’s something that feminists in the ’70s tried to fight against but has been totally lost in the 21st century consumer-celebrity world. So for me, when I look at the poster for Sucker Punch it seems actually incredibly sexist, because it is sexually objectifying women regardless of if they can shoot you or not.”
“I have a kind of immediate, knee-jerk reaction to such iconography,” Wright continued. “I remember when the Spice Girls came out in the mid-’90s and it was all about girl power, but one of them was dressed as a baby doll, do you know what I mean? That isn’t girl power, that isn’t feminism. That’s marketing bullshit. And I find it very, very alarming.”
I’ve been following the Twitter feed re Hanna (Focus Features) and the general reaction to it thus far has been quite good. Joe Wright has directed such movies as Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist, so this action movie is a departure for him.
Here is the IMDB plot summary for Hanna:
A 16-year-old who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.