Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson’s The Hustle is the latest all-female reboot of a male-oriented movie, gender-swapping the classic Michael Caine/Steve Martin comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. With the success of movies like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, it won’t be long before women can simply lead their own movies without being tied to earlier properties starring men. But until then, while actresses gain the kind of influence in Hollywood that they’re long overdue, more female reboots of older movies starring men will be on the way. So, with that in mind, here are 10 Movies That Need A Female Reboot.
It’s rare that women get to play gangsters in movies. The crime genre is one of the most male-dominated categorizations in Hollywood. But there are female criminals out there and they’re underrepresented on the big screen. The premise of The Usual Suspects is that a bunch of criminals meet in a police lineup, pull off a heist, and then have their story twisted by an unreliable narrator reading names and locations from around the room. That could easily be swapped to an all-female cast, with the police lineup simply revolving around a female suspect instead of a male one. It would make a great ensemble piece, too, like Ocean’s 8, a chance to get a bunch of awesome women on-screen together.
Richard Linklater shot his coming-of-age opus Boyhood over a decade or so, in order to capture his lead actor growing up. It’s a grand, sweeping movie about growing up – but it’s about growing up male. Only boys can relate to Mason’s story. A female remake titled Girlhood could give young girls a character they can relate to. It would mean another child actor growing up with a film crew stopping by every couple of years to shoot some more scenes of the movie she’s in, but as Boyhood has shown us, the rewards of this unique kind of filmmaking are obvious.
As long as the Tomb Raider movies continue to screw up the female version of Indiana Jones that we already have, a female reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise sounds like a good idea. Steven Spielberg seemed open to a Raiders reboot with a female Indiana Jones, even if his wording was a little clunky: “We’d have to change the name from Jones to Joan, and there would be nothing wrong with that.”
Jones is the last name, so it would be weird to leave a female version of the character with a male first name and a female first name instead of a surname. Still, Spielberg’s open to a female Indy, so it could happen.
As possibly the most masculine, male-focused movie ever made, nothing is screaming out for a female reboot louder than Fight Club. Melissa McCarthy suggested “female Fight Club” as a bridal shower as a joke in Bridesmaids, but it’s not a bad idea. With Netflix’s GLOW, Charlize Theron’s visceral action movies, and more and more female superheroes making it to the screen, audiences are getting used to women fighting on-screen. The female Fight Club wouldn’t follow exactly the same plot, since everyone knows the twist by now, but it could have the same anarchist message and black-comic tone. “I am Jane’s dream of a female reboot of Fight Club.”
Trading Places is a classic comedy, but it’s also an interesting study of the class divide. Dan Aykroyd plays a wealthy businessman and Eddie Murphy plays a streetwise grifter. They both think they’d be better off in the other one’s shoes, so like it says on the tin, they trade places. In the same way that Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a two-hander whose male leads were replaced by women in The Hustle, Trading Places is a two-hander that would work just as well – if not better, with an even more socially conscious plot revolving around women in the workplace – with female leads instead of male ones.
The point of The Expendables franchise was to bring all the old-school, muscle-bound action movie stars from the ‘80s together in one movie. So, why not do the same for all the female action movie stars? The Expendables franchise has a great cast, but they’re all male. The third one brought in Ronda Rousey, but that was too little too late. An all-female Expendables movie called The ExpendaBelles (seriously) has actually been in the works for a few years, but it’s time it actually got off the ground. Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez, Uma Thurman, Zoe Saldana, Demi Moore – the casting possibilities are endless.
We’ve seen what happens when a male ex-CIA agent’s daughter goes missing overseas and he flies over there to track her down. Now, let’s see what happens when the same circumstances befall a female ex-CIA agent instead. To keep the gender-swapping consistent, the daughter could even be swapped for a son to subvert the trope of the damsel in distress.
It wouldn’t need to be a straight remake of Taken. Instead of Paris, it could be a different major European city – or a different continent entirely. Instead of being sex-trafficked, the kid could be sold off as a drug mule.
Apart from a couple of cameos by Rihanna and Emma Watson (the latter of whom reappeared for one scene later on before fleeing with all the food), the star-studded apocalypse comedy This is the End was very male-oriented. The 2013 original starred Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and everyone else for their comedy clique as the worst versions of themselves. Let’s see the Bridesmaids gang play themselves and tackle the same apocalypse from the other side of Los Angeles from a female perspective: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Maya Rudolph, Ellie Kemper etc., all playing themselves. It would make a pretty awesome movie.
The Heat proved that women could lead a buddy cop movie, so there’s no reason why they couldn’t lead a grittier, more dramatic cop movie. Training Day would be a prime candidate for this, as its premise is simple and character-driven, and therefore easy to rewrite for a female cast. It stars Denzel Washington as a veteran cop who takes rookie Ethan Hawke out on his first day. As the day progresses, Hawke realizes Washington is dirty and tries to expose him. Washington went on to win an Academy Award for his performance in the movie. A female reboot of Training Day could grace the screen with a new iconic duo with fantastic chemistry.
We got a taste of what an all-female Avengers movie might look like in one scene in Endgame, and it was awesome. Captain Marvel, Valkyrie, Shuri, the Wasp, Gamora, Nebula, Mantis, and every other badass female superhero from the MCU fighting alongside each other was such an incredible sight that it warranted more – like a whole movie of it. Brie Larson has already said she’d be open to an all-female Avengers movie, and she just proved that a female-led MCU film can be a huge box office smash with her $1 billion-grossing solo movie, so there’s no reason not to do this.
