Joss Whedon has spoken out against "genuine, intractable sexism" within the comic book movie industry.
Speaking to Digital Spy on the set of The Avengers: Age of Ultron last summer, two months prior to Marvel Studios and DC's announcements of Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman respectively, Whedon emphasised the need for Marvel to buck the trend.
"It's a phenomenon in the industry that we call 'stupid people'," Whedon said. "There is genuine, recalcitrant, intractable sexism, and old-fashioned quiet misogyny that goes on.
"You hear 'Oh, [female superheroes] don't work because of these two bad ones that were made eight years ago', there's always an excuse."
Whedon, whose own Wonder Woman project at Warner Bros was famously cancelled after several years of development, went on to praise The Hunger Games as proof that female-led blockbusters can be a bankable prospect.
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"Hunger Games is a different structure and aesthetic to a certain extent, but these narratives where people are bigger than life and they're in these terrible, heightened circumstances, it's all part of the same genre," he said.
"Marvel is in a position of making a statement simply by making [a female-led] movie, which I think would be a good thing to do.
"But it has to be a good movie, it has to be a good character, and most of the best characters in Marvel are owned by Fox, let's face it!"
The Avengers: Age of Ultron is released on April 24 in the UK, and opens on May 1 in the US.
Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
