Aliens has her beat by a few decades.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Yeah, and Aliens is actually GOOD.
Came here to say this. Why do people forget about Ellen Ripley?!?
It's strange, because Ripley is like the #1 "I don't hate women in movies, just bad writing" excuse
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alien doesnt count?
She was widely ridiculed for the quote with Alien as a notable example.
I think the rest of the quote was pretty accurate. She was speaking to gender bias in Hollywood and saying she was happy to be an exception, which I think was fine. But because she said something boneheadedly wrong to tee up the point, that's all anyone really remembers about it.
You can be wrong but still hold a valid point broadly.
If you say "franchises" instead of movies and limit it to movies where the woman is the STAR and not part of a duo (Terminator and Terminator 2) and goes for 3 or more movies the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alien.
Theres a lot of female starred standalone movies, and a decent number of duos, sometimes with sequels. But once you start looking beyond that it gets REALLY skinny really fast.
Resident Evil has entered the chat...
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(2 replies)
Underworld
Or Terminator 2?
Alien came out 12 years before terminator 2.
Yes, I was just giving another extremely well known example that predates Hunger Games by a few decades
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Id even say that arguably that doesnt count.
She was a lead role, but Michael Beihn and Arnie got top billing in the Terminator and Terminator 2 movies. Edward Furlong and Linda Hamilton had "starring" roles but they werent the lead.
Sure, but Sarah was really the protagonist. Regardless, Alien came much earlier
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Dude, there are at least:
- Alien
- Doomsday
- Planet Terror
- Aeon Flux (edit: not Aron Flux)
- Catwoman
- all Charlie's Angels movies
- and literally all Mills Jovovich movies
They are not all that well known, but the claim is still complete nonsense.
Edit:
- Ultraviolet
- Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
- Sucker Punch
- Salt
- Pans Labyrinth
- Lara Croft
- Kill Bill !!! (How the f did I forget Kill Bill?)
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Absolutely does. But they wanted to introduce us to one of their favorites. Which if I must say absolutely is an underrated awesome movie. Gina Davis is great in almost everything she's ever been in. They didn't imply it was the first.
As you said aliens definitely predates it and also counts. But the statements that it was the first big female led action movie was just so ridiculous because there are so many good ones that are easy to point out. Just how that blue origin launch with the all female crew was somehow this big step for females in space. Completely ignoring and down playing all the female astronauts throughout NASA's history.
Fun fact about that: I think it was Mike Mullane who was on one of the first missions with a female astronaut. He found her, obviously, to be beyond qualified, and was just as furious as all the other astronauts of any gender at the dumb type of "how will you do your makeup in space" type of questions she would get from the press.
Anyway, partway through the mission her hair got caught by some kind of machinery, sucked in and tangled up in it, and it was a little bit of a pain in the ass to get things sorted out. She hunted down every single member of the crew and made them swear an oath under threat of terrible violence not to say a goddamned word about it, because it was intolerable that there be some actual negative issue with some reality that was connected with her gender in any way, that anyone could point to as a reason why male astronauts were better.
Then he put it in his book. Of course. Hopefully enough time had gone by at that point that we understood that astronauts can be qualified even if they have hoo-has. Or, well, we did until Jeff Bezos got involved.
Alien isn't an action movie. It's a horror. Aliens, however, is absolutely an action movie.
Dunno if that counts as an action movie, but she is wrong because there were a number of action movies with one or more women as leads in the 70s and 80s. They were B movies, but still movies!
How quickly we forget Foxy Brown.
Shows the age demographic
What about Underworld ?
Zorroβs Black Whip beats Hunger Games by 68 years. And we live in a universe where the Tomb Raider and Alien films exist, as well as Elektra, Foxy Brown, and yes even Catwoman.
Donβt trust actors, especially when they are selling something.
they will say anything, it's literally their job on the promotion circuit
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aliens
La Femme Nikita (original French), Alien, and Terminator 2 all had seriously kick-ass female leads.
The internet loves ridiculing women who slip up, or like Jennifer Lawrence in this case, are maliciously taken out of context for the purpose of ridiculing women
"I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldnβt work β because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead."
I'm curious how you're gonna spin that as being taken out of context.
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I think some of it is because we love our action women! Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton were fucking AWESOME action stars that were unique, smart and complex; and not just "woman who acts like a douche male" type that most modern poorly written female action stars are.
And IMO they were way better actresses and better written than whatever hunger games was.
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Doesn't the internet ridicule everyone who slips up though?
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I wasn't allowed to watch "violent" movies as a kid, so I missed a lot of action classics like RoboCop, Rambo, etc. But there were a few exceptions we had on tape so they got watched a lot. Long Kiss Goodnight, T2, Alien,... I rewatched this one again a couple of years ago and was shocked at how violent it actually is. It finally clicked that my single Mum was making an exception for iconic kick-arse women.
IIRC she was specifically talking about the young adult genre.
Fuck guys, I forgot about this. I'm going to write a strongly worded tweet to Jennifer because I bet she forgot she was wrong too!
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This feels more like she was obviously exaggerating for dramatic effect versus outright lying. In a conversation, I think most would understand that she meant not very much and she was talking about the young adult genre in general.
Other female led action movies that came out in 2012 include- Brave, Underworld: Awakening, Resident Evil: Retribution, Silent Hill: Revelations... but I feel like I'm belaboring the point that many others have made by now.
Aeon Flux?
EDIT: Ah someone beat me to it.
scroll down for good movies
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