There’s nothing ugly about the $27 million dollars that R-rated romantic comedy The Ugly Truth pulled in this past weekend, outperforming expectations and sticking it to negative critics. Ever since the Cameron Diaz comedy The Sweetest Thing bombed at the box office in 2002, studios have been afraid of R-rated movies for women. Even The Sex & The City movie has been written off as a fluke since it was based on a series and already had a built-in fan base.
So thank you Ugly Truth, thank you Katherine Heigl and thank you writers Nicole Eastman and Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith. Hollywood can’t ignore this kind of cash! Though The Ugly Truth was a definite two-hander for Heigl and Gerard Butler, its target audience was clearly women – and the femmes forked over plenty of green. Let’s hope the next few years will bring us a female Wedding Crashers and a female Hangover.
Women are winning in tamer flicks, too. The PG-13 rated Proposal had a had $37 million dollar opening weekend, 45 year-old Sandra Bullock‘s best ever. According to Variety, The Proposal has grossed $140.1 million to date, making it one of the highest-grossing romcoms of all time.
The next frontier: A Pixar movie with a female protagonist. As much as I loved Up, The Incredibles, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Wall-E and every other movie they’ve ever made, where are the leading ladies? Come on, we can do it!
Why I agree with you in principal – we certainly need more roles for leading women and movies about women and their lives – I disagree with your lead example. Sorry, but if “The Ugly Truth” is as good as us women get, then no thanks. If anything the movie perpetuates ugly stereotypes, masking them into some sort of unconvenient “truth”.
Well guess what, that may be true for shallow guys and the kind of girls who date shallow guys, but it’s not true for all women (or men) and it’s certainly not true for me.
Can we stop with the idiotic “Pixar needs to make a movie with a girl!” crap already? As Andrew Stanton said in response to this: “If we made movies to order, they would suck!” They make what they have great ideas for, and until they have a great idea for a female lead they won’t make one, simple as that.
How is writing a movie with a female protagonist “made to order” ? If that’s true, then writing a movie about a male protagonist would be equally made to order, no? They had great ideas for stories about monsters and robots and old people who like balloons, and these stories only lended themselves to male characters? This offends me. I suspect that writing a woman leading the story has never even occurred to the male workers of Pixar.