Golden Globe winner Sandra Bullock and her Heat co-star Melissa McCarthy have broken through the glass ceiling with the success of their female cop-buddy comedy and cleared the way for more female-driven blockbusters.

Originally Fox’s expectations for Heat were so low that it was planned for a quiet release early in the year. Only after seeing the enthusiastic reactions from test screenings did executives decide to push its opening to the summer to compete
with the major blockbusters. The box office figures proved them right. The Heat beat a male-buddy actioner White House Down convincingly. Nonetheless, the road to making The Heat was not without challenges, director Paul Feig and his two stars Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy told the HFPA when they met at The Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York. When Bullock was asked by her producer friend a couple of years ago about the kind of film she wanted to be in, she answered “A two-hander female comedy.” The producer’s reply was “Ok, that doesn’t exist.” “Well, then let’s get the scripts that have been written for men and haven’t been made, and let’s see if there is a premise that we love, where we can change the names,” she said. Indeed, in the past such films have been exclusively reserved for male characters in Hollywood, which has invariably eschewed making female-driven blockbuster movies. Every summer, male-led movies, such as The Hangover, Iron Man, Batman, Spider-Man and Superman, fill the big screens of multiplexes around the world. The female characters are usually relegated to the superficial roles of the lead’s love interest, or assistant, or even just an object of desire. But in 2011, the phenomenal success of the female-led ensemble comedy, Golden Globe winner Bridesmaids, which was also directed by Paul Feig,  stunned Hollywood and injected a new hope for more female-driven movies. But despite Golden Globe awards, it didn’t
yield a plethora of female movies. In fact, a recent study by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has revealed that 2012 was the worst year for representation of women, both onscreen and behind the camera. Nonetheless, Bullock, who had almost given up on producing due to the lack of projects with strong women -and preoccupation with producing a baby- is upbeat. “It’s exciting now what you’re able to do,” she enthuses. “You don’t have to fight as much to find material.” Feig concurs, blaming the term “chick flick” on perpetuating the notion that female movies have only one focus: a woman finding a man or falling in a love. “We’ve been fed such a steady stream of romantic comedies starring women, which is fine, but I want to see other aspects. I want to see them getting to be tough.” He gets his wish in Bullock’s latest movie, director Alfonso Cuaron’s space action tale Gravity in which she is on screen much of the time on her own, battling and overcoming all challenges after her space shuttle is destroyed on her first mission and she spirals out into the blackness of space. —-Sam Asi