When You Can't Take the Blame

The internet and the entertainment industry are buzzing with the rumor that Jeff Robinov - president of production for Warner Brothers - has stated that following the failures of both The Invasion and The Brave One, "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." Gloria Allred has already issued a response, stating, "It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men. Instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of judgment about which scripts to make, directors to hire and budgets to OK, some men in the movie industry find it easier to place blame for their lack of success on women leads and to exclude talented female actors from the top employment opportunities in Hollywood in favor of macho males."

Perhaps Robinov's move is designed to finally draw attention to his lesser failures at the box office. As the Warner executive has previously pointed out, he is responsible not only for catastrophic failures like Superman Returns, but also for lesser failures such as the $35 million The Fountain (which returned froughly $17 million in US DVD and box office sales) and the $30 million The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (pulling in a whopping $746,000 at the box office). With regards to his staggering ability to lose his employer's money, Robinov has said: "If Superman had done twice what it did, the whole summer would have looked different. It's as much about perception as reality. Even with the failure of a movie like Poseidon, we've had much smaller movies we've lost as much on." [reported by Defamer]

Gloria Allred's point is well taken. In 2006-2007, the male-fronted films Superman Returns, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Lucky You have all lost money, as did critically-acclaimed buzz generator The Good German. The male-fronted We Are Marshall and another buzz generator, Blood Diamond both managed to gross more than their budgets, unlike the aforementioned titles. Even so, they fell short of the success mark, long determined by Hollywood as being the mark where the grosses of a film reach three times the production budget. Even these make up only a partial list of Warner Bros. box office bombs featuring male leads in the past two years alone, as we have yet to touch on The Wicker Man, Lady in the Water, The Ant Bully, Poseidon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or even the wildly-macho buddy comedy Beerfest.

In fact, Warner Bros' largest box office bomb listed in a recent MSN article is the John Travolta vehicle Battlefield Earth, based on the book by L. Ron Hubbard. A movie that can be faulted for many things, but not for having a woman in the primary role.

Perhaps Robinov is depending on more than just his recent box office record to justify his decision not to include women in future lead roles. Perhaps Robinov's logic is more in the vein of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose leader famously proclaims that America is the target of terrorist attacks because America allows gays to have legal rights. Obviously, Warner Brothers is not having difficulty making money off of its films because they greenlight bad scripts, hire the wrong directors, or rush films through production to take advantage of media hype - rather, God must hate Warner Brothers because they dare to employ women as the leads in their films.

Maybe the fault can be found closer to the heart of the corporation itself. After all, Blood Diamond, The Fountain, and The Good German were all critically acclaimed and all featured popular actors. All three failed at the box office. Superman Returns was roundly panned by both critics and audiences. All four of these movies lost Warner Bros. money, but only Superman Returns saw an outrageous promotional push - and only Superman Returns headed to the box office with enough history in place to sell a decent number of tickets on name recognition alone. Perhaps the question that must be asked is how Warner Bros. can afford to spend millions of dollars to promote a film that already has the attention of the public while skimping on promotion for films with little to no audience awareness and still manage to make failures of all of them - with none of them featuring a lead actress to blame.