(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 23 August 2025 22:30, UK
In a world ruled by gender norms and expectations of performing your sex, even movie genres can’t escape being labelled as ‘for men’ or ‘for women’.
This often comes down to the fact that movies associated with women tend to feature female protagonists and themes deemed stereotypically feminine, like romance, while ‘male films’ are violent and action-heavy. It’s interesting that this has come to define cinema as much as it has, because think of all the amazing female protagonists that have shaped horror and thriller films over the years with an insatiable desire for bloodlust, for example.
Double standards abound in the world, for how come a comedy like Mean Girls is deemed a girly chick-flick that many men wouldn’t be caught dead watching, while Superbad is a cult comedy classic that women are expected to appreciate as much as men? That same paradigm is easily applied to action movies, too. Masculinity is the main driving force behind most action movies, with the machismo of their leading male actors as the primary reason for almost every sequence.
You might think that beefed-up protagonists are traditionally aimed at women, but that’s far from the truth. There is an underlying eroticism to these movies that is not aimed at heterosexual women but at heterosexual men.
Meanwhile, female action movies have often existed as nothing more than the butt of jokes delivered by narrow-minded men, which is something Margot Robbie is adamant about changing. The star has done her fair share of action with her role as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, and subsequently The Suicide Squad, and Birds of Prey, naturally keen to expand the genre’s serious acceptance of women.
Robbie and her production company LuckyChap Entertainment were even hoping to make an all-female version of the action-adventure swashbuckling franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, giving women the chance to see themselves as heroic victors of the seas, but this remained a pipe dream. Still, the actor is clearly passionate about putting women at the forefront of her work, hoping to use her position of power to change the way that audiences view women as individual agents on screen – because it’s not just men who can throw punches.
With a love for action cinema, she is unable to comprehend why Hollywood can’t come around to making the genre more accessible for female viewers, too. “I’d been thinking for quite some time how there was a real gap in the market for a female ensemble action film. And I love action films, and I think there’s a misconception, perhaps subconsciously, for people: action films are for dudes, girls don’t really like them. Which is just not true. I love them! I know heaps of other women who love them,” Robbie told Variety.
So, what is her favourite action movie? She seems to be a big fan of a classic female action film that has often been ridiculed, although it almost certainly would’ve been received more seriously if it featured men in the leading roles instead. “I loved movies like the Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu Charlie’s Angels growing up,” she revealed.
Directed by McG AKA Joseph McGinty Nichol, the film took the original television series as inspiration and crafted a campy take on the action genre, more self-aware than the kinds of manly action films which often take themselves too seriously. Charlie’s Angels knows exactly what it is—an action romp laced with humour and a fair bit of satire shade thrown at the tropes of women’s representation in traditionally masculine action films that could appeal to a wide audience—but many men unfortunately turn their nose up at the feature. But women can do action just as well as men, and Robbie is determined to make the world believe that.
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