Elizabeth Banks speaks honestly about her experience making Charlie’s Angels. While Banks is perhaps best known for her acting in films like The Hunger Games, the actress has also broken into directing in recent years. She began directing feature films back in 2015 with Pitch Perfect 2, in which she also acted. In 2019, she directed an adaptation of Charlie’s Angels. The film starred Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska, Patrick Stewart, Sam Claflin, and Banks herself.
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Despite its action film appeal and the star power behind it, Charlie’s Angels wasn’t exactly the smashing box office success that one might expect it to be. In fact, Charlie’s Angels bombed at the box office during its opening weekend, scoring only $8 million. This paled in comparison to a budget estimated around $48 million. During its entire run, Charlie’s Angels 2019 ended up profiting very little money overall. At the time, Banks took this to mean that people were not interested in a female-led action film, and spoke up about this on social media and during interviews for the film.
Banks elaborates on her Charlie’s Angels experience in a recent interview with NYT. In the interview, Banks posited another theory about the box office failure of Charlie’s Angels. She proposed that “there was a disconnect on the marketing side,” wherein the film was only marketed towards girls. This selective audience was not what Banks intended, however, as she wanted to make an action film for the more general audience, sort of in the vein of Mission: Impossible. Ultimately, Banks is still “proud of the movie” and cited specific aspects in which she takes pride. Check out the full quote from Banks below:
I’ll just be in trouble. Let me say I’m proud of the movie. I loved Kristen Stewart being funny and light. I loved introducing Ella Balinska to the world. I loved working with Patrick Stewart. It was an incredible experience. It was very stressful, partly because 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. 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.
Elizabeth Banks’ Charlie's Angels Experience is Emblematic of Hollywood Trends
Banks’ comments can resonate far beyond the confines of the Charlie’s Angels experience. What her comments boil down to is not merely a single failure of one marketing campaign, but rather, an archetype for a wide scale issue within Hollywood’s treatment of female directors. The studio did not let Banks make just any action film, but a female-led action film. While this could have still been a valuable, and perhaps empowering project, the studio ended up further limiting Banks’ audience through a marketing campaign that also treated this just as a project for women. Even if this was not the intention, this ultimately may have driven part of the audience numbers limitations if men did not think that this film could possibly be aimed towards them.
Banks was treated like she had to make “some feminist manifesto” when really she wanted something more subtle: an action film, that happens to star women. Banks’ experience is thus emblematic of how female-led action films are viewed in Hollywood. Charlie’s Angels could not just be an action film starring women, in Hollywood’s eye, but rather had to be some transgressive feminist project to be worthwhile. Disrupting Hollywood standards by showing women in action roles typically given towards men just did not seem to be enough for audiences, in Banks' point of view. Hopefully, stories like that of Charlie’s Angels can be a lesson to Hollywood executives, who can consider marketing campaigns that do more justice to the female-led films and bring in audiences.