Hollywood needs a hero. Box office receipts are plummeting. Pirates are stealing its first-run movies. TV and streaming video are nipping at its heels. And perhaps worst of all, its core audience of young males is defecting to video games.
This looks like a job for ... a girl.
The film industry is aggressively courting girls and young women this summer with movies for, about and by females. And maybe it’s a change that’s here to stay.
Movies take years to fund, produce and distribute, so this paradigm shift can be attributed to the success of the “Hunger Games” and “Twilight” series. Females made “Frozen” the highest grossing animated film ever. Even the Harry Potter franchise was levitated by girls who had read the books.
But if one person is the face of this revolution, it’s Melissa McCarthy. She was a scene-stealer in Paul Feig’s blockbuster “Bridesmaids,” and her subsequent movies have been critic-proof hits.
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McCarthy and Feig reunite this summer for “Spy” (June 5), in which she plays a CIA analyst who goes undercover to thwart an international arms dealer.
While Feig preps his all-female “Ghostbusters” for 2016 release, co-star Kristen Wiig will appear this summer in the bank-heist comedy “Masterminds” (Aug. 7) and the coming-of-age drama “Diary of a Teenage Girl” (also Aug. 7). Wiig’s lottery-winner comedy “Welcome to Me” is currently playing the festival circuit before a nationwide rollout (TBD).
Taking a cue from McCarthy’s buddy-cop comedy “The Heat,” Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara star as a pint-size policewoman and a drug-cartel whistleblower in “Hot Pursuit” (May 8).
Australia’s answer to Melissa McCarthy, Rebel Wilson, joins Anna Kendrick and an ensemble cast of ladies in the musical sequel “Pitch Perfect 2” (May 15), directed by Elizabeth Banks.
While female directors are still relatively rare, Maya Forbes has directed the film version of her novel “Infinitely Polar Bear” (June 19), a custody drama starring Zoe Saldana and Mark Ruffalo. Claudia Llosa directs Jennifer Connelly in “Aloft” (TBD), a drama about a woman who encounters the son she abandoned 20 years earlier. And Sophie Barthe’s version of the French classic “Madame Bovary,” starring Mia Wasikovska, is angling for a summer release (TBD).
Another lace-collar classic coming to theaters is “Far From the Madding Crowd” (May 8), starring Carey Mulligan as a headstrong Victorian woman choosing between three suitors.
John Green’s teen-cancer novel “The Fault in Our Stars” became a hit movie in 2014. The adaptation of his novel “Paper Towns” (July 24) sounds like a teen version of “Gone Girl,” with Carla Delevingne as the girl who stages her own disappearance.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” (June 26) is this year’s teen-cancer movie, with Olivia Cooke, Thomas Mann and Nick Offerman.
A dead pop star is the subject of “Amy” (TBD), a documentary about the short, turbulent life of Amy Winehouse.
The Amy of the moment is Amy Schumer, who plays a hard-partying, foul-mouthed career woman with commitment issues in Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck” (July 17).
A foul-mouthed former Olympian (Melissa Rauch) defends her hometown turf from a rival in “The Bronze” (July 31).
Adolescent science nerd Britt Robertson enlists reclusive inventor George Clooney to take her to an alternate world in Disney’s “Tomorrowland” (May 22), directed by Brad Bird (“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”).
Veteran actresses get spotlight moments in the road trip “Grandma” (Aug. 21), starring Lily Tomlin, and the elder romance “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (May 15), starring Blythe Danner.
Juliette Binoche plays a veteran actress rehearsing a play with Chloe Grace Moretz under the watchful eye of assistant Kristen Stewart in “The Clouds of Sils Maria” (Friday).
The queen bee of American actresses, Meryl Streep, is generating buzz for her role as a rock singer in Jonathan Demme’s “Ricki and the Flash” (Aug. 7), written by Diablo Cody (“Juno”).
The buzzing noises in a young girls’ head are the subject of the Pixar ’toon “Inside Out” (June 19), with Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Lewis Black, Bill Hader and our town’s Phyllis Smith as the voices of her competing emotions.
Young girls are the target audience of the “Despicable Me” spinoff ’toon “Minions” (July 10). In the weekends after Memorial Day, teenage girls can choose between the possessed-girl horror flick “Insidious: Chapter 3” (June 5) and the possessed-by-love “Aloha” (May 29), Cameron Crowe’s military-themed romance starring Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and Emma Stone.
And grown women will be asking “What’s love got to do with it?” when they line up for “Magic Mike XXL” (July 1), the male-stripper sequel starring Channing Tatum and co-starring Jada Pinkett Smith as the new boss of the beefcake emporium.
Of course, there’s no way to muscle all the male heroes out of the multiplex this summer, but even the action movies are foregrounding the female characters. Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) and Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch) are prominent in the all-star “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (Friday), Emilia Clarke as the new Sarah Connor is the focus of “Terminator Genisys” (July 1) and Charlize Theron has a meaty role in “Mad Max: Fury Road” (May 15).
Theron also is the traumatized survivor of a ritual killing spree in “Dark Places” (Aug. 7), based on a novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”).
And finally, Patti Jenkins (who directed Theron in “Monster”) is set to direct Gal Gadot in “Wonder Woman,” DC Comics’ first stand-alone super-heroine movie. That film, though, won’t bust down the doors of the boys’ club until 2017.
OTHER SUMMER RELEASES
May 8
“The D Train” • Lifelong loser Jack Black coattails on James Marsden at their high school reunion.
“Maggie” • Arnold Schwarzenegger nurses daughter Abigail Breslin through a zombie outbreak.
“Lambert & Stamp” • The story of the Who, as told by the men who discovered them.
“The Salt of the Earth” • Documentary about a photographer who specializes in poverty and war.
May 15
“Slow West” • A boy treks across the western frontier to find his lost love.
May 22
“Poltergeist” • A repeat warning against building a subdivision on a burial ground.
“Good Kill” • Ethan Hawke stars in a drone’s-eye view of modern warfare.
May 29
“San Andreas” • When an earthquake hits L.A., Dwayne Johnson smells what’s cooking.
June 3
“Entourage” • Film version of the TV series about a movie star and his freeloading friends.
June 5
“Love & Mercy” • Paul Dano and John Cusack play young and old versions of Beach Boy Brian Wilson.
“Testament of Youth” • World War I from a woman’s point of view.
June 12
“Jurassic World” • Chris Pratt guards the gates of a bad-idea theme park.
“Saint Laurent” • A biography of the French fashion designer.
June 19
“Dope” • A hip-hop dramedy set in LA’s underground club scene.
“Manglehorn” • Al Pacino is a lovelorn locksmith.
June 26
“Big Game” • A teen rescues President Samuel L. Jackson after his plane is shot down by terrorists.
“Max” • Imagine if “American Sniper” starred a dog.
“Ted 2” • Mark Wahlberg’s pot-smoking teddy bear has more to say.
July 10
“Self/less” • Dying mogul Ben Kingsley transfers his consciousness to Ryan Reynolds.
July 17
“Ant-Man” • Paul Rudd is a shrinkable superhero.
“Mr. Holmes” • Ian McKellan is the aging Sherlock, solving one last case.
“Irrational Man” • Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone do the Woody Allen thing.
“The Stanford Prison Experiment” • College students abuse each other for science and spare change.
July 24
“Pixels” • Adam Sandler, Kevin James and Peter Dinklage use video-game skills to battle aliens.
“Southpaw” • Jake Gyllenhaal is a boxer with a left-field punch.
July 31
“End of the Tour” • Jason Segal plays brilliant-but-troubled novelist David Foster Wallace.
“The Gift” • Jason Bateman is stalked by high school acquaintance Joel Edgerton.
“Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” • Tom Cruise performs daredevil stunts in strategic film markets.
“Vacation” • Ed Helms and Christina Applegate are the next generation of visitors to Wally World.
Aug. 7
“The Fantastic Four” • Between three and five comic-book characters band together to do hero stuff.
Aug. 14
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” • Henry Cavill is a ’60s CIA agent and Armie Hammer is his Soviet ally.
“Straight Outta Compton” • The true story of West Coast gangsta rappers N.W.A.
“Underdogs” • Argentine soccer ’toon.
Aug. 21
“Criminal” • The consciousness of a CIA agent is injected into a bad guy.
“Me Before You” • Farm girl Emilia Clarke becomes a caretaker to wealthy paraplegic Sam Claffin.
“Sinister 2” • We’re guessing it’s a horror movie.