While there will undoubtedly be no shortage of male action
powerhouses this summer in cinema, Hollywood might soon be getting the message that female audiences can still
make for a box office hit, while leaving their guy friends behind.
Maleficent is
titular star Angelina Jolie’s first silver screen appearance in four years, and
easily her biggest opening weekend ever. Maleficent
grossed just over $69 million its opening weekend and took the lead in the
box office, pushing X-Men, Days of Future
Past, down to #2 at $32.6 million. While some may be saying the film is only “riding the coattails” of
victory of November’s female power duo Frozen
(also Disney), audience statistics might suggest otherwise.
Disney’s Maleficent,
a dark, reimagined version of Disney’s own 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, tells the well known
fairytale of Princess Aurora from the perspective of one of Disney’s most
popular villains, Maleficent. And
while the film script is a testament to subpar writing and character development,
and the film is itself an overwhelming mess of CGI magical creatures, Angelina
Jolie’s shattering performance is worth the four-year wait. Jolie’s character becomes
a terrifying and glorious anti-hero, portrayed as fierce, independent, and a hurricane
of revenge. Viciously betrayed by her childhood love Stephen (Sharlto Copley),
who has now become ruler of the neighboring kingdom, Maleficent curses his
newborn child with the fate of an eternal sleep, triggered by the prick of the
iconic, if obsolete, spindle of a spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday. To
spite the king, the coma can only be broken by true love’s kiss, which, thanks
to Stephen, Maleficent no longer believes in.
Similar to Wicked, Broadway’s
smash-hit musical that turns the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz into an anti-hero
complete with depth and heart, Maleficent
follows the recent revisionist trend of rehashing old classics to get a new
feel. Maleficent echoes Disney’s
surrealist 2010 hit Alice in Wonderland, and
the more recent Oz: The Great and
Powerful, in 2013; Jolie’s villain has spunk, strength, and actual
substance, something missing from many of Hollywood’s female characters.
That distinction made all the difference in the box office however,
and Frozen’s coattails or not, Maleficent saw financial success. Frozen, notable for its portrayal of not
one, but two female leads, has gone
on to become the highest grossing animated film of all time, beating out
Disney’s The Lion King, and Pixar’s Toy Story 3. What sets Frozen apart from Disney’s previous
princess flicks however, is the focus on sisterly love, as opposed to romantic
love, which ultimately breaks the spell the characters set out to reverse.
Maleficent behaves
in much the same way, with Maleficent ultimately providing the kiss of true
love needed to lift the curse that she herself cast. Having come to love
Princess Aurora in the sixteen years she watched her from afar, Maleficent is
overcome with grief and guilt when Aurora falls into her enchanted sleep, and
though she no longer believes in true love’s kiss, commits herself to breaking
the spell. As a last-ditch effort, she brings a handsome boy (coincidentally
named Phillip) that Aurora once flirted with to the princess’s aid, to no
avail. In another departure from Disney standards, the prince, much to the
amusement of the audience, confesses that he would feel uncomfortable kissing
Aurora, having only met her once. When his kiss fails to wake the princess,
however, Maleficent throws him out, convinced that true love cannot exist.
After Phillip’s failure, Maleficent’s apology and subsequent curse-lifting kiss
is not surprising, but is still a welcome change of pace from the cloying, shallow
creampuff romance of most princess movies, something that female audiences took
to heart.
Based on Hollywood’s summer turnouts, one would think that
the only group filmmakers are targeting is men, and this is not entirely
untrue. Viewed as the most reliable, the male 18-25 year old demographic is the
most sought after audience at the box office. Movies that appeal to men
typically star men, and so Hollywood keeps cranking them out. The logic is that
women will go see movies about men, but men won’t go see movies about women. Maleficent, a box office success,
sported an audience comprised 60% of women. Frozen’s
audience was 57% women. Even more recently, the hit film adaptation of John
Green’s best-selling teen romance novel The
Fault in Our Stars, starring Shailene Woodley, boasted an audience comprised
82% of women, 80% of those being between the ages of 18 and 25 years old.
Though ticket sales show that men and women, especially the
coveted 18-25 year old demographic, attend movies with nearly identical frequency,
the movies in theaters disproportionally favor men. What Frozen, Maleficent, and The Fault in Our Stars prove, however,
is that movies about women still can be, and are box office hits, with or
without a strong male audience. What the films’ content proves even more is
that female audiences want to see, and are willing to pay for, substantial
movies about substantial female characters.
Maleficent doesn’t
disappoint.
