Elizabeth Banks’ 2019 reboot of “Charlie’s Angels” didn’t take off. Critical reviews were very mixed, more so than audience ones, and the film made only $73 million worldwide from a budget of around $50 million – becoming one of 2019’s biggest disappointments.
Looking back at the film, Banks says tells The New York Times she is still “proud of the movie” but has some regrets about the film’s marketing. Specifically, said marketing was mostly targeted young women, at the expense of not making it into a film that appeals to a wider audience, which may have been a mistake:
“I wish that the movie had not been presented as just for girls, because I didn’t make it just for girls. There was a disconnect on the marketing side of it for me. When women do things in Hollywood it becomes this story. There was a story around ‘Charlie’s Angels’ that I was creating some feminist manifesto. I was just making an action movie.
[I] would’ve liked to have made ‘Mission: Impossible,’ but women aren’t directing ‘Mission: Impossible.’ I was able to direct an action movie, frankly, because it starred women and I’m a female director, and that is the confine right now in Hollywood.”
Banks says at one time, a “big producer of big action movies” told her that she couldn’t direct action films because “male actors were not going to follow me”.
The film followed on from numerous TV and film incarnations from the successful original 1970s series and the two McG-directed early 2000s films which were major hits, to the short-lived 2011 TV series incarnation that has been almost entirely forgotten.
