Why is Hol­ly­wood keep­ing its female pro­tag­o­nists a secret?

The hero of Zoo­trop­o­lis is female. That shouldn’t come as a sur­prise; Dis­ney have been telling female-ori­ent­ed ani­mat­ed sto­ries since 1937. Yet Judy Hopps is dif­fer­ent. In a bound for­ward for the stu­dio she is nei­ther roy­al­ty nor a damsel in dis­tress but the tit­u­lar city’s first bun­ny police offi­cer, a plucky upstart fight­ing insti­tu­tion­alised prej­u­dice in one of the best ani­mat­ed fea­tures in years.

Not that you’d be able to tell any of this from the film’s mar­ket­ing. Accord­ing to the trail­ers, the chief pro­tag­o­nist is a street­wise fox named Nick Wild. The first teas­er is all about him. Oth­er pub­lic­i­ty mate­ri­als homed in on his hus­tling schemes – one trail­er depicts the scene where he and Judy team up entire­ly from his per­spec­tive. Plen­ty of fac­tors con­tributed to this mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, the most obvi­ous being that Nick is voiced by a big name star (Jason Bate­man) where­as Judy is voiced by the less promi­nent TV actor Gin­nifer Good­win. There’s also the small mat­ter of the whop­ping big gen­der issue.

Of course, Zoo­trop­o­lis is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent. The mar­ket­ing (not to men­tion mer­chan­dis­ing) for Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens posi­tioned Daisy Ridley’s Rey as sim­ply part of the pack, with turn­coat stormtroop­er Finn the one pro­tag­o­nist seen wield­ing a lightsaber in the trailer’s biggest mon­ey shot. The same went for Sicario, the trail­ers for which pushed Beni­cio Del Toro’s ambigu­ous assas­sin just as much as Emi­ly Blunt’s put-upon FBI agent. And it’s hard to ignore cur­so­ry exam­ples like The Hate­ful Eight and Ant-Man, both of which fea­tured well-known female actors in great sup­port­ing roles (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh and Evan­ge­line Lil­ly respec­tive­ly) tossed aside in the marketing.

So what’s real­ly going on here? With gen­der inequal­i­ty being such a hot issue in the movie indus­try right now, you’d think that stu­dios would be smart enough to be seen active­ly cham­pi­oning these female char­ac­ters. You could of course argue that Hol­ly­wood is sim­ply try­ing to sur­prise audi­ences by not reveal­ing the impor­tance of these char­ac­ters, yet the real truth of the mat­ter lies in the some­what flim­sy and per­sis­tent belief that big bud­get movies front­ed by women sim­ply don’t sell tickets.

Just look at some of the more fla­grant recent exam­ples of this mis-sell­ing tac­tic. In Mad Max: Fury Road it was instant­ly appar­ent to any­one watch­ing that direc­tor George Miller was a lot more inter­est­ed in telling the sto­ry of Char­l­ize Theron’s fem­i­nist free­dom fight­er, Imper­a­tor Furiosa, than Tom Hardy’s epony­mous nomad – to the extent that they share top billing in the open­ing cred­its. Yet Furiosa, Immor­tan Joe’s wives and the Vuvali­ni were all rel­e­gat­ed to the back­ground through­out the film’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign. This has long been the case in this par­tic­u­lar fran­chise – in the sec­ond instal­ment, The Road War­rior, Max Rock­atan­sky is lit­tle more than a bit-play­er, but that didn’t pre­vent a focused back­lash against women invad­ing a man’s movie.

The prob­lem is that in one way or anoth­er, sci-fi fran­chis­es, car-based action spec­ta­cles, super­hero movies, even non-princess Dis­ney flicks, are all deemed accord­ing to con­ven­tion­al wis­dom to be ​“boy’s movies” – or to put it anoth­er way, non-female. Analyse every major new Hol­ly­wood release star­ring a woman in what could be con­sid­ered a tra­di­tion­al male role and a depress­ing pat­tern starts to emerge: women can play any role, they just can’t be viewed as the lead. This out­mod­ed mind­set is how we end up with an ace kids’ movies per­pet­u­at­ing insti­tu­tion­alised gen­der inequal­i­ty in 2016.

In today’s moviego­ing cul­ture we’ve been con­di­tioned to expect great female roles to be hid­den. Won­der Woman may be get­ting her own spin-off movie, but not before she’s played sec­ond string to two more supe­ri­or male super­heroes in Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice. So while on one lev­el it’s encour­ag­ing to see big bud­get fran­chis­es address­ing this issue by tak­ing the lead of pop­u­lar series like The Hunger Games, clear­ly there is a lot more work to be done. For now it seems the impor­tance of cer­tain female pro­tag­o­nists will con­tin­ue to be down­played in the run up to a film’s release. If stu­dio boss­es actu­al­ly sat down and watched Zoo­trop­o­lis, how­ev­er, they’d notice that of all the social obsta­cles fac­ing Judy, sex­ism isn’t one of them.