Having been held up as a bastion of pop culture greatness for over 20 years thanks to her era-defining stint as the star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar is well within her rights to pass comment on the current trends and fads.
Unfortunately, the actress isn’t best pleased with what she’s seeing, particularly when it comes to the way Marvel Cinematic Universe “fans” have been reacting to the franchise’s major female-driven project. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Captain Marvel, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and the A-Force assembly from Avengers: Endgame would be three of the most notable culprits, and Gellar feels disheartened.
Speaking to The Guardian, the small screen icon and vampire slayer extraordinaire did admit that comic book blockbusters are ” a genre is where women can really succeed and hold an audience,” which was proven true by the bumper box office returns enjoyed by Brie Larson’s origin story and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman.
However, she did go on to voice her concerns, and it’s easy to see why she feels that way.
“Every time a Marvel movie tries to do a female cast, it just gets torn apart… Unfortunately, audiences weren’t as accepting. There’s still this mentality of ‘the male superhero,’ this very backwards way of thinking.”
Captain Marvel is one of the lowest-rated of the MCU’s 30 features in terms of Rotten Tomatoes audience average, while She-Hulk is the lowest-ranked of the entire Marvel Studios era. Critics disagreed, but all you have to do is spend two minutes on the internet to figure out why she feels that way.