Warner Bros Blames Women

That’s right.  The reason their movies aren’t doing so hot?  Women leads.  I shit you not friends:

This comes to me from three different producers, so I know it’s real: Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a new decree that “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead”. This Neanderthal thinking comes after both Jodie Foster’s The Brave One (even though she’s had big recent hits with Flightplan and Panic Room) and Nicole Kidman’s The Invasion (as if three different directors didn’t have something to do with the awfulness of the gross receipts) under-performed at the box office recently.

Actually this gets even more interesting:

(Then again, Robinov’s poorly performing Superman Returns was criticized for its girlie-man portrayal of the superhero.)

Wow.  So anything feminine apparently equals box office failure to the big wigs over at Warner Brothers.  Nice.

Gloria Allred responds:

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.

This is great PR for Warner Brothers and its parent company Time Warner.  From the Time Warner website:

Our Commitment to Diversity

Diversity is a major objective and core value at every stage of our business – from investments to casting films – diversity will give us a competitive advantage, because our success depends upon creating, producing, and distributing products and services that are of compelling interest to the broadest audiences and markets.

We believe that embracing diversity is the right thing to do, and it is good for our business. As company, we look at the key issue of diversity across multiple areas of our corporate citizenship.

Explore the site.  Count the number of times they use the word diversity.  Talk about corporate repetition.  Its everywhere.  This is a company that wants consumers to associate diversity with their brand, and they extend this to the movies they make.  And looking at their top ranks in the corporation, this approach to women is uniform:  at most they have a supporting role.  Funny how that commitment to diversity translates into reality.

But it kind of goes without saying Warner Brothers and Time Warner would get this so wrong.  If they think the problem with their box office performance is having a woman lead, its not like the company has a firm grasp of reality in the first place.