When Will Marvel Start Making More Black Widow Toys and Other Female-Friendly Merchandise?
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is an unstoppable money train at this point, churning out (mostly) great films and seemingly gaining more fans with every new movie. And while it's easy to crap on DC's output in the film department in comparison, they're certainly dominating Marvel in one area where it matters: merchandising. DC just announced that they're creating a superhero line for young girls, while Marvel — a company that has otherwise been relatively progressive over the years — still can't seem to wrap its head around the fact that if little girls are digging your movies, comics, etc., it might be nice to create some toys that are geared toward them. Hell, it's not just "nice," it's financially beneficial to them! Girls are actively looking for Black Widow merchandise to buy, but there aren't very many options out there for them. Similarly, there was a big dust-up when Guardians of the Galaxy came out about how Gamora was excluded from a lot of the merchandising.
I don't want to get too far off topic here, but with the riots in Baltimore, I've seen this Junot Diaz quote passed around a couple of times over the past few days:
If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
I think to a lesser degree, that sentiment can apply to young girls growing up loving modern geek culture. There was a time when it was (sadly) considered the norm to reject and shun women who were into geeky stuff, but as geek culture has slowly turned into mainstream culture over the past couple of decades, there's been a big shift toward openness and inclusion of women. That's awesome, and absolutely necessary. It shouldn't have ever even been an issue in the first place, but progress is undoubtedly being made. But when one of the stars of Marvel's biggest movie takes to Twitter with a statement like this, there's a problem:
Come on, Marvel: when the Hulk asks you to do something, you should probably do it. He asked nicely that time, and you wouldn't like him when he's angry.