Nobody is saying this. (Strong) Female main characters have been in many successful movies and video games before and nobody bat an eye, quite the contrary, they loved them: Sarah Connor - Terminator, Trinity - Matrix, Ripley - Aliens, Lara Croft - Tomb Raider, Blood Rayne, Salt, Black Widow, Lucy, Charlie's Angles, etc, I could go on and on, and I'm no movie/video games enthusiast to know all movies with female leads.
The big difference is that those females were always written as the main characters in their own stories from the start, whereas what Disney is doing, along with Gemini and other woke corporations, is they try to replace established male characters of beloved IPs with female leads in the worst way possible, by disrespecting the original character that made the franchise popular and shoehorning a fake Strong Girl Boss™ stereotype with no personality and no character arc in his place, and then when the movie inevitably flops they blame the CIS white male audience for being incels "unable to handle strong females".
Do you think people would go to see James Bond or Top Gun Maverick if they replaced the male lead with some female actress that's trendy right now? Or would they see Tomb Raider if they replaced Lara Croft with Tom Holland? You can try for diversity's sake of course, but the audience and bean counters might stop you.
A sequel or remake doesn't need to be exactly the same as what came 40 years prior.
Back in 1995 Star Trek Voyager added a female captain and a black Vulcan (a first, as far as I know), which passed with little to no comment. Voyager was also widely criticized, but that was just because the writing wasn't very good. Tim Russ' portrayal of Tuvok is generally praised.
Why did they hire a black guy for the role Tuvok even though Vulcans had previously always been portrayed as (very) white? Probably because he was the best actor to audition for the role.
Today I'm 100% sure people would be shouting about "DEI" and whatnot and that Voyager is bad because woke this or that.
Of course, Star Trek also very explicitly did DEI right from the start in the 60s.
I’m the same person I was back then and I don’t even remember tuvok being black being brought up.
It’s almost as if we’ve spent almost 30 years focusing on race and telling specific subgroups they are bad and it had the predictable result of making people even more reactionary and even more racist.
Let’s be real tho. The division is the point. Hard to have a class struggle when everyone’s so focused on race.
Salt was not that good (backpedaling from trash -- it wasn't that bad), but the lead was for a man, if that contributes to the conversation...
Lucy was trash, and I wont relent from that without hard evidence.
Not because of the cast or other movie related things, but because it would have been better as a sentence.
Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film for all the reasons bad films have been around for 100 years, and that's it. This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.
Also Harrison Ford is 81. He's old. Almost old enough to run for presidency. It's physically impossible to make films with Indie like it's 1982. They tried that with Robert DeNiro and unintentional comedy ensued.
Oh, and I heard all of this bollocks with Mad Max too, and that did well enough. Again, sometimes a bad film is just a bad film.