The supernatural flick exceeded expectations in June, snatching Lady Bird’s title as the studio’s most profitable movie to date. The fate of Solo juxtaposes with the sleeper hit Hereditary from A24 (the indie powerhouse behind Moonlight, Ex Machina and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Viewers were fatigued by this rehashing of the same fraying narrative.
Although a number of factors explain its paltry box-office performance, the most telling of which is that its previous installment was released just five months prior. Solo: A Star Wars Story, which became the lowest-grossing title of the franchise in May, is a case in point.
Yes, audiences will inevitably turn out for an Avengers or a Deadpool, but – reading the ticket-sale tea leaves – there are signs that we’re less interested in the constant stream of overfamiliar films.
Addressing this imbalance makes business sense, while also appealing to our hunger for the new. Antiheroines, by contrast, have largely been absent from popular culture. The Walter Whites, Don Drapers and Tony Sopranos of the small screen have been fleshed out so often that they have achieved archetype status. Since market competition is growing, production companies must adapt with the times and keep us engaged: innovative shows with underrepresented protagonists have proven they can do this. This leaves room for more ambitious programmes with complex female characters like The End of the F***king World, in which the runaway schoolgirl Alyssa blackmails, steals and manipulates, but also protects her boyfriend or The Good Place, featuring a morally questionable and self-absorbed Eleanor, who is nonetheless fighting against her basest instincts by learning moral philosophy.
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This year alone, Netflix has rolled out 700 series and 80 films to its 137 million-strong subscriber base – who spend 100 million hours a day using the service.īut how does this relate to antiheroines? Since viewership has exploded, with 99 per cent of Britons watching four hours and 41 minutes of TV and video a day, studios are no longer forced to cater uniquely to the lowest common denominator. Now, we are positively inundated with content: subgenre upon subgenre is available on Sky, on Amazon Prime, on iPlayer. Either you settled in to watch one of the five channels beamed onto your TV set or you headed out to your local multiplex, which would most likely be playing a handful of blockbusters. In the days of yore before streaming and satellite, visual-entertainment options were limited. We investigate what has sparked this rise in antiheroines. Why are these women daring to flaunt convention? Why aren’t they making themselves likeable (and therefore acceptable) to polite society?” The influx of women behaving badly in film and television this year is slowly chipping away at these outdated expectations, prising off the overly perfect veneer that so often clings to female characters. As Gay remarks: “When women are unlikeable it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations. Despite objections from this naysayer, 2018 has seen a marked increase in untraditional female roles that don’t pander to the idea that women should be nice: from Killing Eve’s charismatic assassin to the all-women bank-robbing team of LFF's opening-night movie Widows.