BATTLE OF THE GIRL BOSS FRANCHISES

 It's difficult to tell when "girl bosses" have negatively affected an ESTABLISHED franchise. Even if an audience does not like a given female character, they may still like the franchise enough to support it. But if the audience does NOT support a previously profitable franchise, it's also difficult to prove that the presence of a bad female character was the reason.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was an unquestionable box office bomb. I liked it much better than the much more profitable entry in the series, CRYSTAL SKULL, so I have to ask, "why did audiences not want to see it?"

Long before the film hit theaters, there were podcasts bagging on Indiana's co-star Helena Shaw being a "girl boss." So many people may have stayed away from DIAL with the negative sense that Disney wanted to "replace" Indiana with a younger female hero. BUT-- the same negative opinions also swarmed around 2021's NO TIME TO DIE, in which it was rumored that Bond was going to be replaced by a female 007-- and TIME was not a flop. In both cases audiences had reason to believe that the respective films were going to be the last hurrahs for both the Craig Bond and the Ford Indiana, but they supported one and not the other.

I also personally think that Helena Shaw was a better character than her detractors claimed, even after they saw the movie. Certainly she's more three-dimensional than Nomi, the new 007. I think both female characters were being floated by their studios as POSSIBLE new feature-characters, but neither is so overbearing as to beat the original character into the ground, as the early podcasters feared. Those podcasters MIGHT have overreacted, though it's important to state that such neutralization DOES happen when an old franchise character's on the way out and a new one's on the way in.

So we can't in the end say that DIAL failed because of a girl boss. Her presence might not have HELPED, that's the most one can say. Given that some complaints were made that DIAL was depressing because Ford looked his age, I find an alternative theory more believable: TIME succeeded because it allowed Bond to go out looking good, DIAL flopped because it didn't allow Jones to look unfailingly great from start to finish.

HOWEVER, all of that applies to ESTABLISHED franchises, and I think Disney has flopped with many of its NEW girl boss franchises. Take THE MARVELS (please). There's no reason to see that film except to celebrate the girl boss rhetoric, but it was so bad, even the people who want more girl bosses didn't go see it, and it was a tremendous bomb. So IMO one can blame the "girl boss" theme for "going broke" only when there's no other contributing factor.