Marvel needs to do better by its female heroes

Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) fronts an all-female superhero team, Xialing (Meng'er Zhang) is the leader of the Ten Rings and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) is King of New Asgard.

It's undeniably a refreshing improvement on the all-boys club back in Phase One, where female characters mainly served as the damsel in distress for their superhero boyfriends to save (Pepper Potts, we’re looking at you). Yet, this is only half of the story.

Marvel has frequently mishandled these characters and their movies. Back in 2021, Scarlett Johansson famously sued Disney for Black Widow's dual release in cinemas and on Disney Plus, as her salary was partly calculated on box office earnings.

If she hadn’t filed the lawsuit, Johansson would have lost out on millions of dollars.

Equally, the long-awaited standalone film took so long to come to fruition that Natasha had already died in the main canon of the MCU, while most of her male co-stars had completed their own trilogies.

That's not to say there haven't been female characters in the MCU who have had nuanced portrayals. With the arrival of Disney Plus, Marvel revisited some of the underdeveloped female characters in their existing canon and introduced more diverse, nuanced roles.

WandaVision was a unique cultural experience for MCU fans, who tuned in each week to see a new episode unravel more of Westview.

In many ways, the series was more a two-hander between Wanda and Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) than Wanda and Vision (who was an extension of her mind and chaos magic).

Either way, it transformed the image of Wanda from a one-dimensional supporting character to a formidable, powerful presence in the MCU.

So imagine the disappointment when she returned as an underdeveloped villain in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and died by the end of the film. As Marvel moved back to the big screen, the cracks in the once cohesive universe began to show again.

Wanda became another fatal mark in Marvel’s twisted pattern of killing off powerful female heroes. In the epic two-part finale of the Infinity Saga, arguably the franchise’s most prominent female characters, Gamora and Black Widow, both died as the sacrifice for the Soul Stone.

Let’s not forget that Jane Foster was then brought back for one outing as the Mighty Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder, before she died.

Meanwhile, many fans are still recovering from the surprise return and shock death of Maria Hill in the first episode of Secret Invasion.

Regular, non-superpowered, non-super spy women haven’t fared much better, either. Aunt May is killed by the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Queen Ramonda died in Wakanda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

In many of these instances, this trope is used as a means to advance the male narrative. Their grief forces the male characters into a new future and to embrace the next version of themselves.

Even when there’s an all-female superhero movie, such as The Marvels, and none of the characters die (as confirmed by that post-credits scene), the film’s release is somewhat tainted by examples of misogyny within the fandom.

Before the release of Captain Marvel in 2019, there was relatively little misogyny vocalised by viewers. Prior to this, there were also very few female-led narratives and a string of hyper-sexualised female characters such as Black Widow and Wanda Maximoff in that ultra-tight leather corset in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

But the fan backlash to Captain Marvel was an ugly experience. There was a tirade of complaints rooted in blatant sexism, as Carol (and later Larson herself) was slammed for not smiling enough in the film or the poster.

Regardless of this, Captain Marvel soared higher, further and faster to become a billion-dollar hit at the box-office, but sadly it didn’t stop a selective group of fans from boycotting female-led films in the future.

The first clip of the 2023 sequel became the franchise's most disliked trailer on YouTube within hours of its release, as users review bombed it as "woke".

Many boycotted the film in cinemas simply on the premise that it was female-led, and the film went on to gross the lowest MCU box office of all time.

After The Marvels debuted on Disney Plus, MCU fans who wrote off the film expressed their surprise in how good it actually was. Who knew that a superhero team-up could be entertaining?

Despite the influx in female-led narratives, the sometimes-poor execution of these stories or problematic tropes has left fans frustrated. There have been glimmers of strong female characters with the stories they deserve, but there hasn’t been enough of them.

Similar to The Marvels, there was little promotion for the latest Sony Marvel collaboration, Madame Web.

With rumours of rushed virtual effects - a frequent issue in recent years – the buzz was tepid for the film, before the web unravelled on the big screen. Instead, the one and only trailer became fuel for spider memes and awkward cast interviews.

So, what's the solution? Of course Marvel can't control its fandom, or the misogyny of certain individuals who watch the studio's movies.

But what it can do is improve its approach to its female heroes - giving us nuanced, complex portrayals and actually giving the women of the MCU a chance rather than killing them off at the first opportunity.

Here's hoping the future of Marvel's female heroes is much brighter.

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