Patty Jenkins may have steered Charlize Theron to an Academy Award win for Best Actress in acclaimed drama Monster, gone on to helm the DCEU’s blockbuster Wonder Woman franchise and recently signed on to tackle Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, but she doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a ‘female director.’
You can understand where she’s coming from, too, and all filmmakers should be judged on the quality of their work and nothing else, but gender and identity politics are a major talking point in the industry, now more than ever as Hollywood pushes for an increase in diversity and reputation. Indeed, Wonder Woman was critically acclaimed and earned $822 million at the box office, but in many circles, it was reduced to being the highest-grossing movie ever directed solely by a woman.
Similarly, many of the headlines surrounding Rogue Squadron touted Jenkins as the first female to helm a Star Wars feature film, although nobody from The Mandalorian‘s camp was screaming from the rooftops about Deborah Chow and Bryce Dallas Howard being the first women directors to tackle the franchise in live-action, with the former also calling the shots on the entirety of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Of course, the mere term ‘female-driven’ is enough to draw the ire of certain folks online, and insider Daniel Richtman is now claiming that Lucasfilm are developing a new Star Wars movie set to be headlined entirely by a female cast, touting it as an “all-female team-up” pic. The tipster offers no further details, and has frequently reported that a number of disparate projects are in the works, but as things stand, there are only three feature films officially in development.
That being said, the focus should be on telling the best Star Wars stories possible after the Sequel Trilogy split opinion straight down the middle, and if the narrative is good enough, then it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things whether the leads are all women or not.
