Ranking the Woman-Led Comic Book Movies We Deserve

Catwoman. Patience Phillips. Halle Berry. 2004.Elektra. Elektra Natachios. Jennifer Garner. 2005. You know what those films have in common besides being horrible movies? They happen to be the most recent female led comic book movies (from the Big Two publishers). There have been plenty of movies where women played major roles or could even be considered co-leads, but as the titular character themselves, we’re looking at a decade of slow job growth for the female hero. But you know what else that brief list says: that Hollywood used to do this. They used to “take chances” on these characters at the box office, even if the results were bad. But that can’t really be used as an excuse for why we don’t have women heroes in their own comic book movies now because…almost all comic book movies sucked during that time. With about 68 (an approximation) comic book movies coming out over the next few years, it seems this is a perfect time to look at how well some of these comic heroines could do at the movies. To keep this somewhat simple, I kept this to just Marvel and DC characters (no Michelle Rodriguez as Lazarus in this post, sadly) and just listed the most popular or impactful woman heroes in those comics today. Three main categories were used for grading relevance and potential success as a film (not including creative teams for a movie of course) on a scale from 1-10: Current Comic Popularity, Mainstream Awareness (ie, how popular are they to non-comic book readers) and Social S…