Actress Jenna Ortega, the star of the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel, knocked the idea of gender-flipped reboots, arguing that women should have their own franchises.
Ortega offered her opinion on gender-flipped franchises during an interview with MTV ahead of the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice release this week. She had responded to a question on whether or not she would star in a gender-swapped reboot of Tim Burton’s classic Edward Scissorhands.
“I love that there’s a lot more female leads nowadays, I think that’s so special. But we should have our own,” Ortega said. “I don’t like it when it’s like a spinoff — I don’t want to see like ‘Jamie Bond.’ You know? I want to see another badass.”
Ortega’s sentiments have become more popularized in recent years, with actors and actresses of different persuasions publicly coming out in favor of more nuanced female-led franchises. Actress Emily Blunt, for instance, said in 2022 that she had grown “bored” of the “strong woman” lead trope.
“It’s the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead,’” Blunt said. “That makes me roll my eyes. I’m already out. I’m bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things.”
Speaking with The Guardian that same year, actress Tatiana Maslany of She-Hulk fame called the trope “frustrating.”
“It’s reductive,” Maslany said. “It’s just as much a shaving off of all the nuances, and just as much of a trope. It’s a box that nobody fits into. Even the phrase is frustrating. It’s as if we’re supposed to be grateful that we get to be that.”
Academy Award-winning actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson also previously criticized the prevailing trend of making women act like men. Speaking on CultureBlast podcast in 2020, the former Love Actually star said that it’s not “good enough” to simply give a woman a gun and have her act like a man, even going so far as to say that movies should utilize a women’s feminity as a source of her heroism.
“So all the women screenwriters I talk to, I say, ‘Well, what’s the story?’ Because it’s not good enough simply to give the women the guns, and then make the women badass, as well,” said Thompson. “Now women have to be badass — if they’re feminine in the way that they used to be, and they’re not badass, then they’re not welcome. Also, they’re not allowed to cry, apparently, anymore, because we’ve just got to be like the men.”
Thompson said that screenwriters and directors need to explore the feminine to find the heroism inherent with it, such as giving birth.
“And I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s not what we meant,’” the actress continued. “When I got a group of women together in my thirties, and I said, ‘Okay, what’s the female heroine? Who is that? What does she do?’ Because she hasn’t got the wherewithal to do the Superman, to do the Godfather, that’s not the point. That’s not where our heroism lies. So how do we make it heroic?”
Other Hollywood franchise heads have taken note. In 2021, Barbara Broccoli, head of the James Bond franchise, said that the titular MI6 hero will remain a man.
“I think [the next James Bond] will be a man because I don’t think a woman should play James Bond,” Broccoli told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “I believe in making characters for women and not just having women play men’s roles. I don’t think there are enough great roles for women, and it’s very important to me that we make movies for women about women. He should be British, so British can be any [ethnicity or race].”
Actress Ana de Armas, who played a “Bond Girl” in No Time to Die, also told The Sun that Bond should remain a man.
“There’s no need for a female Bond,” she said. “There shouldn’t be any need to steal someone else’s character, you know, to take over. This is a novel, and it leads into this James Bond world and this fantasy of that universe where he’s at.”
“What I would like is that the female roles in the Bond films, even though Bond will continue to be a man, are brought to life in a different way,” de Armas added. “That they’re given a more substantial part and recognition. That’s what I think is more interesting than flipping things.”
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