Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson’s Captain Marvel, it won’t be long before women can simply lead their own movies without being tied to earlier properties starring men. But until then, while actresses gain the kind of influence in Hollywood that they’re long overdue, more female reboots of older movies starring men will be on the way. So, with that in mind, here are 10 Movies That Need A Female Reboot.
The Usual Suspects
It’s rare that women get to play gangsters in movies. The crime genre is one of the most male-dominated categorizations in Hollywood. But there are female criminals out there and they’re underrepresented on the big screen. The premise of The Usual Suspects is that a bunch of criminals meet in a police lineup, pull off a heist, and then have their story Ocean’s 8, a chance to get a bunch of awesome women on-screen together.
Boyhood
Richard Linklater shot his coming-of-age opus the rewards of this unique kind of filmmaking are obvious.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
As long as the Indiana Jones franchise sounds like a good idea. Steven Spielberg seemed open to a Raiders reboot with a female Indiana Jones, even if his wording was a little clunky: “We’d have to change the name from Jones to Joan, and there would be nothing wrong with that.”
Jones is the last name, so it would be weird to leave a female version of the character with a male first name and a female first name instead of a surname. Still, Spielberg’s open to a female Indy, so it could happen.
Fight Club
As possibly the most masculine, male-focused movie ever made, nothing is screaming out for a female reboot louder than more and more female superheroes making it to the screen, audiences are getting used to women fighting on-screen. The female Fight Club wouldn’t follow exactly the same plot, since everyone knows the twist by now, but it could have the same anarchist message and black-comic tone. “I am Jane’s dream of a female reboot of Fight Club.”
Trading Places
Trading Places is a classic comedy, but it’s also an interesting study of the class divide. Dan Aykroyd plays a wealthy businessman and Eddie Murphy plays a streetwise grifter. They both think they’d be better off in the other one’s shoes, so like it says on the tin, they trade places. In the same way that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a two-hander whose male leads were replaced by women in The Hustle, Trading Places is a two-hander that would work just as well – if not better, with an even more socially conscious plot revolving around women in the workplace – with female leads instead of male ones.
The Expendables
The point of the casting possibilities are endless.
Taken
We’ve seen what happens when a male ex-CIA agent’s daughter goes missing overseas and he flies over there to track her down. Now, let’s see what happens when the same circumstances befall a female ex-CIA agent instead. To keep the gender-swapping consistent, the daughter could even be swapped for a son to subvert the trope of the damsel in distress.
It wouldn’t need to be a straight remake of Taken. Instead of Paris, it could be a different major European city – or a different continent entirely. Instead of being sex-trafficked, the kid could be sold off as a drug mule.
This is the End
Apart from the worst versions of themselves. Let’s see the Bridesmaids gang play themselves and tackle the same apocalypse from the other side of Los Angeles from a female perspective: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Maya Rudolph, Ellie Kemper etc., all playing themselves. It would make a pretty awesome movie.
Training Day
stars Denzel Washington as a veteran cop who takes rookie Ethan Hawke out on his first day. As the day progresses, Hawke realizes Washington is dirty and tries to expose him. Washington went on to win an Academy Award for his performance in the movie. A female reboot of Training Day could grace the screen with a new iconic duo with fantastic chemistry.
The Avengers
We got a taste of what an all-female her $1 billion-grossing solo movie, so there’s no reason not to do this.
