Addendum: We all know how this will play out.

Last post I was irritated but not willing to commit to my irritation.

I'm willing to commit to being pissed off now, and not because this has been confirmed.

I'm willing to commit to being pissed off because tomorrow the business week starts and we'll see Warner Bros. PR react to this. They will issue a statement that no such thing was said, and the three anonymous producers who "confirmed" the story are not likely to pop out of nowhere and contradict that. There will be nothing written anywhere that states this is the policy, because we all know how the world works. Nobody needs to write sexism into the rules (nobody needs to voice it either, so there's still a good possibility he never actually said it), the boy's club all act on it anyway. So, WB will get to play the victim of "baseless allegations of sexism" and nothing will change.

Which means we'll still see little to no attention given to action movies with female leads.

We'll see almost no female superhero movies, except for the sort that emphasize looking down the main character's spandex without a thought for quality.

Wonder Woman will still be consigned to Development Tartarus.

See, Mickle has a point in her comment. We all know that's their line of thinking. We all know every time a female-led action film doesn't do very well they lump the blame on the fact that it was led by a woman and become that much less likely to make a female-led action film. We know they judge actresses for bust size and low bodyfat rather than muscles and presence when casting female superheroes. We've seen it, its the behavior pattern, we all know how the fucking industry works.

Then we get this vague rumor of a comment that we've heard a million times, only now its attributed to a name so we can finally point and say "Gotcha!" and now we talk boycott and letter campaign and tomorrow they're going to deny the whole fucking thing and play everyone tht's mad up as a bad guy.

Maybe we'll get lucky, maybe they'll say he said it and apologize. You think he'll be sacked? Maybe. Then some other guy'll take over and enforce the same fucking policy and just not say anything about it.

Fuck that, we need progress not apologies. Its not good enough they won't say this shit, we need them to stop acting on this shit and in order to do that we need to convince them to stop thinking this shit.

Well, fuck that. You want to confront Robinov or one of his idiot colleagues? Chuck the "You said a bad bad thing" shit out the window. Confront him with the half-assed job they did with Catwoman. Confront him with the shitty ratio of female-led action movies to male led action movies and then when he says that female-led action movies don't sell confront him with the shitty effort put towards those female-led action movies and how male-led action movies with shitty effort put into them don't succeed either, and that more male-led action movies flop than female-led action moves anyway -- because there's just more of them!!

You want a boycott of Warner Bros? Do it with an aim. To hell with that stupid statement! They'll apologize at best and deny it at worst and never change a fucking thing. Give a real goal. Tell them you won't see a Warner Bros movie until they get off their asses and film Wonder Woman! Tell them you want as much quality put into films with women as put into films with men! Tell them you want a big-budget film with a female lead! Tell them you want to see some progress, dammit!!!

Eh.

Okay, that sounded great in my head but now that I have it written down it seems so futile. Various people have been sending that message for a while. Articles and studies and letters. Rational argument hasn't worked before. Maybe its because we haven't had any good fuel beneath it. This could be good fuel. Obviously, enough people have seized on it that it speaks to something people are pissed off about. Maybe we can combine outrage with a productive goal here. If we all shout "You said something bad!" they learn that what they said was a bad thing to say. They'll keep on doing what they do, just with their mouths shut. If we all shout "You need to do THIS" maybe, just maybe they'll realize they need to do that.

Maybe all it'll do is make us feel better. (Which is worthwhile in itself, but will lead to feeling like shit when The Dark Knight comes out and we all have to decide whether or not seeing a Warner Bros movie is worth it after this.)