On this final weekend of July, 2024, Deadpool And Wolverine stands poised to become a smash hit at the box office. It’s Certified Fresh at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, but more than that, the word of mouth from friends my husband and I trust has been incredibly positive. Anyone who isn’t a fan of Pixar can be forgiven for regarding the new Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman action comedy as the savior of this year’s thus far lackluster summer movie season.

I’m just not interested.

I never saw the first Deadpool, but I found Deadpool 2 a delight; it not only swept me up in its wave of irreverent humor, but it gave me a female character I could like and admire, Deadpool’s badass lady ally Domino, played by Zasie Beetz. Sadly, my interest in the third film sank like a stone when I learned Beetz would not be returning, and the details that emerged afterward regarding the film’s creators going all in on the bromance — this is Wolverine, after all — confirmed my suspicions that I was being cut out of the potential demographic for this new film. The trailer I saw didn’t help. In the main portion, the only female character to speak a line of dialogue was the villain, and her line — “Boys are so silly” — made me groan aloud, as the smallest hint of Straw Feminism spurs me to run for the hills. It did conclude with an amusing epilogue featuring Leslie Uggams, always a welcome presence, but its position within the trailer as a whole made it clear that hers is a bit role, not an integral part of the plot. Overall, it left me with an impression of a movie determined to deflect any and all of the accusations of “wokeness” and make it clear to its prospective audience that it is not, but NOT, part of the much-derided “M-She-U.” This may explain why Beetz wasn’t asked to return. Thanks to the determination and persistence of social media’s “Anti-Woke Brigade,” the same bitter crowd that turned Disney+’s enjoyable series Ms. Marvel into a guilty pleasure and raised a gloating howl at the disappointing box-office performance of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the era of the big-screen live-action superheroine, begun so auspiciously with Wonder Woman in 2017, seems to be over.

Now, the fact that Deadpool And Wolverine wasn’t made with me in mind does not mean it isn’t a good movie. Sources I trust say it’s great, and I hope they’re right. I want my husband to have the time of his life when he goes to see it. A good movie, whatever its target audience, is always welcome. What I wish, however, is that a few more genre movies of similarly high quality were made with me in mind, and on those rare occasions when they do emerge (e.g. the aforementioned Furiosa), the Anti-Woke Brigade would refrain from launching a barrage of attacks on their very existence and just let them be.

Some fiction that centers girls and women — for instance, Oscar-bait films like Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall, and Past Lives — remains relatively safe from attack. Yet when a fantasy, sci-fi, or action-adventure film with a female lead fails to generate strong box-office numbers, the Brigade seizes on this as evidence that women just aren’t interested in these genres and therefore it’s a waste of time for makers of these types of films to consider women as a potential audience. All we care about is romance, they declare, so this is the only type of movie we should star in; we have our things (almost always romantic comedies, occasionally a good costume drama and, surprisingly enough, horror), and they have theirs (everything else). Yet what is the general attitude toward romance, the kind of story it’s acceptable for a woman to lead? It tends to be dismissed out of hand as subpar and undeserving of any serious attention. If stories were written with women in mind, the thinking seems to run, they must be silly, shallow twaddle. Where does this attitude come from? Is it a conscious or unconscious misogyny that sees the female audience as undeserving of anything more “substantial” (assuming, of course, that romance inherently lacks substance)? Or is it that too much of the stuff marketed to female audiences is, in my opinion, just not very good? Where does one problem end, and the other begin?

I can’t help comparing current and recent “chick flicks” (a descriptor altogether lacking in respect) to the 1930s and 1940s “woman’s pictures” (a descriptor slightly more respectful, but still segregating the movies meant to appeal to women from the rest of cinema), and the comparison isn’t in today’s favor. In both the “chick flick” and the “woman’s picture,” the search for love lies at the center of the female protagonists’ stories, but in recent romantic comedies (romantic dramas scarcely figuring into it anymore), the stakes tend to be low. Audiences don’t have to worry whether a couple will end up together because they already know they will, whatever phony obstacles the screenplay might toss in their path. Worse, very little effort is put into helping the audience understand why the two people are drawn to each other in the first place, what each likes and admires about the other; she’s cute, he’s cute, they have “chemistry” (even when they don’t), end of story. Characterization also remains at surface level, so the personalities and performances don’t linger in the memory once the movies are over.

Contrast that with some of the best of the “woman’s pictures,” movies like Three Comrades (1938), In Name Only (1939), Greta Garbo’s body of work, especially Camille (1936), All This and Heaven Too (1940), Now, Voyager, Random Harvest (both 1942), and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). The makers of these films took the trouble to craft interesting and complex characters that an audience could make a real emotional investment in. When the couples got together, it mattered. When they didn’t get together, it mattered. The filmmakers wanted to give their audiences something good, because — at least it seems to me when I watch the films — they actually cared about said audiences. Perhaps that lies at the heart of the difference: the caring. Today’s makers of “chick flicks” don’t care enough about the stories they’re telling or the audiences they’re aiming for. It’s hard for me to respect a movie, or a filmmaker, that doesn’t respect me.

If women are meant to be satisfied with a small corner of the cinema world, then let the makers of the movies in that corner remember their audience is made up of people who, as Jo March puts it in 2019’s Little Women, “have minds and souls as well as heart.” I beg them: don’t keep doing a half-assed job because you think that in our quiet desperation we’ll gobble up any slop you put in front of us; instead, take honest pride in bringing a story of genuine quality to life. Speaking as someone who rarely bothers with romantic comedies unless they’re Jane Austen adaptations, show you care about me as a consumer, and I’ll start caring about you and your work.

But that still leaves the other problem to deal with, the idea that stories about and for women, however good they might be, have less value and importance than stories about and for men. In her brilliant study A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930 – 1960, Jeanine Basinger quotes critic Richard Corliss: “How can I defend a film as art if I include [on a Ten Greatest Films list] any Hollywood produce among the received masterpieces? After all, Potemkin (which I admire but don’t really like) is the very stuff of cinema — but Now, Voyager (which I love but am afraid to admire) is only a movie! As a result, the typical ten best list wound up looking like screening selections for an undergraduate course in Seminal Cinema 101. And the Now, Voyagers of the film world were relegated to a mind-closet containing all of the critic’s secret sins.” I wonder just how many more of critics’ “secret sins” are classic-era “women’s pictures.”

If the people making the films by and about women have somehow absorbed the idea that their films don’t matter much in the long run into their subconscious, small wonder they put so little effort into them. The worm eats its own tail, and I don’t see any clear solution than to tackle it one movie at a time.

My husband will be seeing Deadpool And Wolverine, and afterwards I’ll ask him to give me a full report. It will be a little longer before I venture out to the multiplex again (unless, it turns out, the trailer was totally misleading and there is in fact a female character I can like and admire). Perhaps the creative team behind Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice will show they care about me as an audience? They are behind the smash Netflix series Wednesday, after all.