Captain Marvel’s screenwriter says Marvel went above and beyond to include women

Captain Marvel screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet revealed Marvel put in extra effort to make the movie an inclusive project, but the industry as a whole still needs progress.

Captain Marvel isn’t coming out until next spring, but fans, including us, are already excited about getting another superhero movie that is led by a woman. We are also excited that Captain Marvel features a female screenwriter.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet, just like Carol Danvers, is a woman in an industry that is dominated by men. Superhero movies have predominantly featured white men in their stories, and most of these movies have been made, written, and directed by men, too. Robertson-Dworet is an action-genre screenwriter who will be adding Captain Marvel to her list of impressive projects. She has also written the recent Tomb Raider reboot and worked on Sherlock Holmes 3 and Gotham City Sirens.

In an interview with NPR, she talks about the film and what goes on behind the scenes. We are happy to hear that Marvel has tried to include more women in making the film as Robertson-Dowet says:

"Marvel really went above and beyond with Captain Marvel. Not only did they have Anna Boden, who, along with Ryan Fleck is directing the movie … they had many female writers working on the project. They also had female producers in the room. And that is really rare to have that many women involved behind the scenes in a project."

In the interview, she explains how few female writers there are in the field for action, sci-fi, and superhero movies. She told NPR that she is concerned about helping other women who want to break into the field and wants to figure out ways to help them do that.

Part of helping other women, she says, lies in collaborating with them. For instance, she and her friend, Lindsey Beer, were both top candidates for the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons movie. So instead of competing, they teamed up to write the screenplay together.

“We actually called each other up and we were just like, ‘What if we just wrote it together? What if we said to the studio: Let us collaborate. You’ll get something even better than if just one of us wrote it.”

Robertson-Dworet was also inspired by seeing Wonder Woman and is happy to see progress in how heroines are portrayed on screen. Talking about Wonder Woman, she explained:

"[S]eeing her sensitivity and femininity were allowed in the context of an action hero,” she says. “That blew us away. Because so often when we are writing these genre movies, we are told to cut that out. It’s sort of imagined, like, ‘Oh, well, she couldn’t be this sensitive if she’s also gonna kick ass in 2 seconds.’"

She was also excited about how Wonder Woman broke out of the “female superheroes as sex object” problem:

"I thought I was gonna be bothered by her [skin-revealing] costume and then it actually had the opposite effect. You could see her legs and her muscles and it reminded you that this is a woman doing this. And that she is just as strong and just as tough as any male superhero you’ve ever seen."

We can see how they took the issue of costumes seriously when it comes to Captain Marvel’s suit, as we got a glimpse of it in Entertainment Weekly. It’s practical and doesn’t attempt to sexualize the hero.

We are excited to hear about all the women involved in Captain Marvel, and we can’t wait to see how the movie comes to together when it arrives in 2019.