When the original Star Wars trilogy came out, you can see footage from that time of people entering and exiting the cinemas. Men and women alike. It wasn't just men, there were plenty of women. Star Wars was a phenomenon with both sexes. In fact all cultural big hits were. You wouldn't encounter a female fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws and go "a WoMaN likes this?!?"
Big movies didn't really need to cater. Now Star Wars is the most feminine bullcrap ever. The biggest thing movies do is play on two things with women. Cutesy and their love of animals. Baby Yoda as an example and also what porgs and the little sphere R2D2 was meant to trigger in them. There's nothing really "cute" about R2D2 in his design. That little sphere droid in Force Awakens was meant to trigger that feeling in women though, the cutesy feeling. LIkewise Chrewbacca looked really off and the reason for that is he was cutefied. In the OT Chrewbacca had a menacing look to him. In the Disney trilogy every element of his face was softened so that he looks no more threatening than whinnie the pooh.
Likewise with the animal thing. The reason John Wick has his dog get killed is that is the quickest way to get women on board. In reality it's stupid.
I love animals, but I don't give a crap if they die. That doesn't make me heartless, that makes me a man who, like most men, has the ability to compartmentalize and understands the value of animals as compared to human life. I've never seen a woman who isn't really manipulated by their love and protective feelings towards animals. Watch a woman react to John Wick and see how much it impacts them, the dog aspect, compared to men. There's a reason in the old days revenge centered on killing someone you were related to in stories. Because that was universally understood. And don't give me any crap about "the dog represented the wife symbollically". It's just cope to get away from the fact that it's meant to be a lazy shortcut to get women invested in the plot when they otherwise wouldn't.
There's many ways that movies soften the action hero in ways more appealing to women but this wasn't always the case. Women enjoyed men who were rough in movies. Plenty of women enjoyed Bond films and Bond would often be cold, and harsh with women. Which they of course, as we know, women like. They like Bond being charming and wooing women, but they also like that he doesn't put up with women's crap either.
Today men are emasculated in films and despite women naturally hating this in men instinctively, they seemingly let this slide or don't see it happening on some level when they go to the theaters. Like how is it that I can see that Daniel Craig is emasculated compared to 1960s - 80s Bond and this bothers me, yet women who are repulsed by emasculated men flock to the softer action heroes today like John Wick or Daniel Craig bond whereas in the past they might have gone and seen the Dirty Dozen with their husband. Are women becoming lesbians, is that the conclusion?
John Wick is, like all modern action heroes "a nice man". He's polite, he's never politically incorrect. I have an article I'm going to write contrasting John Wick to someone like the Transporter played by Jason Statham.
The Transporter isn't nice, knows about a sex trafficking ring and doesn't care. He only gets involved when it becomes too intertwined with his life that he has too. He actually takes a sex trafficked woman, puts her on the street for her to be picked up again. As he's driving away he reluctantly picks her back up and takes her to his home where he still treats her like crap because she's an inconvenience to him. And after all that, he still refuses to help her rescue her other family because it's not his problem. Only after more time in the story and other personal stakes does he finally become a hero. Action heroes are not good people who do things out of altruism, they are selfish people who via proper scripting are compelled towards making a good turn with well written justification. It's not meant to make you go "something should be done about this" as an audience. It's meant to make you believe a hardened criminal would be compelled to become a hero based on all the events that transpire.
The weak guy who gets browbeaten by his ex wife and scolded for not getting enough of a good gift in Taken, is not the same guy who goes Rambo in a foreign country in that same movie later. Modern movies want their cake and eat it too. Men must be killers with a past, but also nice and politically correct.
In the first Transporter, the first 4 or so action scenes are not motivated by altruism. The first one is motivated by pay (transport criminals for pay), the second for survival (fight cops or go to jail), the third by revenge (guy blows up his car, he comes to beat some faces in) and the fourth by survival again as the guys come to kill him in his home. Once he gets to safety Frank Martin is done with the whole ordeal, and tells the Asian woman who's trafficked, it's not his problem. Eventually he does agree to help her when she keeps persisting to eat away at his conscious.
That's the script getting you to believe the man who is capable of action that puts their life in danger and the man willing to do it can be one in the same and it takes heavy script lifting to get you to suspend that disbelief, as it rarely plays out in that way in real life. There's a difference between in real life when a guy intervenes in a fight to help someone, compared to action movies where they're facing off against a crime syndicate single handedly. The latter essentially never happens in real life, but they expect you to believe it happens by average "nice men" such as Liam Neeson in Taken. And rather than justifying it, the screenwriting trick is to say "he looks nice, but he has a past". This is telling, not showing.
In the Equalizer, another nice guy action hero, Denzel gets involved because sex trafficking is wrong and he sees a woman he likes getting sex trafficked. That's not an action hero motivation. Action heroes don't get involved because they see something the audience also doesn't like. They get involved when the script justifies that this is the logical point they'd get involved, typically reluctantly. JCVD in Hard Target knows about the killing games going on at a certain point, but he doesn't choose to put an end to them. He is forced to because his investigation catches their interest and they start chasing him, so the whole movie is him fighting for survival. He didn't even want to help the woman find her dad, but only did when the job he was going for was all filled up. That's the difference in how things are written now. Actions are taken based on if the audience would want to see it compared to logically written actual action heroes where actions are taken in proportion to how the script has carried them at this point in the movie in line with their characterization.
Almost every action hero from the 80s or 90s and earlier can be seen to have logical script writing justification for their actions, whereas the modern action heroes are "nice" who just are waved away as "they have a past and that's why they can do all this", which doesn't carry explanatory power as to why they would do all this. In reality, a retired hitman like John Wick would not come out of retirement for a dead dog, no matter how much he loved his wife. It's poor script writing and it's a case of having your cake and eating it too.
If you want an example of what I mean by John Wick is a nice man, watch the movie Warriors from 1979. The Warriors gang are the protagonists. They're still criminals, one of them is an attempted rapist, and the main leader, Swan pretended like he was going to rape the female love interest. They're not "good" people, they're just merely the people you root for because of their circumstance. If the Warriors were made today, Swan would never get "rape-y" with that hispanic broad. They'd have to be a politically correct "nice guy gang" who can kill people, but would never say the word faggot for instance.
And that's my point about John Wick. John Wick would never demean a minority or demean a woman, neither would Liam Neeson in Taken. Frank Martin from the Transporter does. He's disrespectful to an Asian woman throughout the movie, treating her like a nuisance.
So my point is the characterization of action heroes is at odds with what they're expecting you to believe they'd choose to do.
When superheroes do altruistically good, we understand that the risk to their life is proportionally small, which is why the early parts of the heroes helping out citizens is just portrayed as power fantasy, and not as supernaturally altruistic. The dilemmas for the superheroes have to be introduced by super villains that up the stakes where the choice to be altruistic actually has consequences in proportion to their superhero abilities.
Good comment.
John Wick is literally a paid assassin. He's not just "not nice". He's necessarily pure evil. If the audience saw all of the horrible things he has invariably done, they wouldn't cheer for him.
This is such a well written observation of the changing times.
Your point applied to so many "heroes" prior to 1997.
It was basically every action role for Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson.
Even with popular characters like John McClane -- he did not want to get involved with the heist during the original Die Hard. He was trying to get the attention of the police -- in fact, that's one of the very first things he does.
John Matrix has zero interest in going back to work in special forces; he was forced to do what he did to save his daughter. He didn't give two craps about the villain's plot to kill the president.
Rambo is basically the epitome of your comment all wrapped up in a nice bow. He was ALWAYS reluctant to get involved because he knew he cost and toll of combat. The entire series is him basically telling people, "I told you so" about not wanting to escalate things. He only ever got involved to save people he personally cared about or save himself.
Heck, even in Rambo, he led those missionaries practically to their death (even after giving them fair warning), and then had to lead the mercenaries in to rescue the missionaries, and he never took charge of the mission, just kind of followed along until at the end.
Good comment