Editorial: How much more evidence does Hollywood need before it trusts its biggest projects to talented women?

“Wonder Woman” did everything that we have said women in Hollywood could do if given the chance: With a female director, Patty Jenkins, and a female lead character played by Gal Godot, the movie earned $103 million its debut weekend in the United States, catapulting it into blockbuster territory and making it the best domestic opening ever by a woman director. (Overseas, it earned more than $120 million.) And it drew almost as many men as women into the cinemas.

In other words, the conventional Hollywood assumptions that a woman director couldn’t score a hit with an action movie or an actress couldn’t open a big summer popcorn flick or guys wouldn’t go see a movie about a female superhero just got lassoed by Wonder Woman and thrown off a building.

Of course, this is still a comic-book movie, the kind that Hollywood studios love to make. In fact, “Wonder Woman” arguably just revived the genre for Warner Bros. after some recent critical stumbles. (See “Suicide Squad.”) How fitting a role for Diana, the princess of the Amazons, who blazes her way through this movie doing any number of things that men have trouble doing.

Even if this is a generic comic-book story about a hero clad in brass armor, albeit on the skimpy side, its creative and commercial success is a noteworthy breakthrough in the still overwhelmingly white male club that is the film industry. Women directed only 7.7% of the top films of 2015, according to the 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been investigating the studios for systematic discrimination against female directors.

True parity in Hollywood for women should include diverse stories focused on complex women without superpowers or spandex. But, in the landscape of all those Batmen and Ironmen, it’s kind of exhilarating to see a woman on screen who speaks 100 languages and deflects bullets off her bracelets. And given that audiences find her winning, how much more evidence does Hollywood need before it will trust its biggest projects to talented women?

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