“‘Sucker Punch’: Zack Snyder says films with heroines still ‘a challenge economically’”

From Hero Complex:

Traditionally, one of the barriers to teen female protagonists driving anything but romances has been the conventional wisdom in Hollywood that such characters alienate male audiences. That didn’t seem to be a problem for the Coens’ “True Grit,” however. Though the PG-13 film is built squarely around Hailee Steinfeld’s performance, its marketing emphasized its male stars, and “True Grit” has brought in more than $86 million at the box office so far on the shoulders of mostly male moviegoers.

Ideally for filmmakers, these heroines don’t turn off men and entice women and girls to genres they might ordinarily skip. At least that’s what Zack Snyder would like to accomplish with the upcoming movie “Sucker Punch,” a feminine twist on the prison-break film in which an 18-year-old character named Baby Doll (played by 22-year-old Emily Browning) fights her way out of a mental institution using her mind, her fellow patients and some samurai swords.

“We have female characters in this situation that’s mostly the terrain of men,” says Snyder, whose film is due in theaters in March. “It’s a challenge economically to find who is the audience for the movie. Our hope is that the movie is transcendent, that it becomes something no one’s seen before and exists outside the models [studios] use to track potential economic gains.”

Some years ago when I was working on a project at Disney, we were told in no uncertain terms this ‘fact’: Boys will not go to movies with female leads while girls will go to movies with male leads. I know there are all sorts of explanations for this phenomenon, but it still doesn’t make it right. And the bummer is it limits the range of story possibilities. I mean imagine if 20th Century Fox had demanded that Ellen Ripley be turned into a male role because men wouldn’t show up for the movie Alien with a female lead.

If you are contemplating the next story to write as a spec script and you envision the lead to be a woman, does it give you pause to think that choice could be hurting your chances of selling that script?

My advice: If the story demands you to write a female lead, write it. If you write the hell out of it, the gender of the Protagonist will become secondary. 

Besides if movies like True Grit [now with $118M domestic box office making it the biggest Coen brothers movie of all time] and Sucker Punch succeed, maybe that conventional wisdom — males won’t go see movies with female leads — will become unconventional.

Here is the trailer for Sucker Punch:

The movie opens March 25.

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