It’s no secret that this summer’s movie season hasn’t been strong on women. It’s been mentioned on Vulture. NPR did a story about it. The New York Times covered it. Even Fox News ran a piece about it.
Yet Jodi Foster has a leading role in the new action movie Elysium, reports Ms Magazine. “How’d she score it? Foster makes a point of having her agent specifically seek out leading-man scripts that can be flipped. Her role in Elysium was originally written for a man.
“More actresses might want to do the same, because the Movie Insider database of films in development and pre-production contains films in which there really is no reason that the main character can’t be a woman.
“A third installment of Night at the Museum is in the works, for example, but Ben Stiller is not yet signed on to reprise his role. In the first movie of the series, much of the plot and humor relies on the fact that the main character is new on the job–in fact, one could argue that deviating from this set-up is why Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian grossed only half of what the original did in its opening weekend. The film’s subtitle, Brother From Another Mother (seriously), indicates that Night at the Museum 3 will return to its previously successful formula and introduce a brother to Stiller’s character who has taken over for him at the museum.
“Other than the dated and possibly offensive reference in the title, not much would have to change to make the new character a sister. After all, the job of the watchman is essentially that of caretaker, which is a job women do every day. The style of the film does require an actor capable of the kind of comedy for which Stiller is known, but there’s no dearth of female comedic geniuses around these days. The role could be played hilariously by Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig or Sarah Silverman, to name a few.
“Kristen Scott Thomas, who recently told The Daily Mail that she has become invisible compared to younger female actors, could play the lead in When the Starlight Ends, in which “a novelist finds himself with the ability to rewrite his past,” an ability he uses to try to reunite with a lost lover, or inTomorrow, in which “a man travels back and forth in time trying desperately to prevent the murder of his family.” It shouldn’t be hard to sell audiences on a woman whose primary motivation is, in the first example, love, or, in the second, saving her family. Gender-swapping these roles would also make the films the first major movies in which the female character is the one who can time travel.”
More at: http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/08/19/gender-flipping-in-hollywood/