There is a common argument tossed around that hashtag activism serves little purpose, and only speaks to those with like-minded ideals. But if something trends, there’s a good chance those voices will reach their intended audience, and while change doesn’t always happen immediately, the intended recipient of hashtags may sometimes be listening. Certainly, Marvel has heard what fans have been saying about their toys online.
Circa the release of “Captain America: Civil War” and “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2” you might’ve seen the hashtags #WheresBlackWidow and #WheresGamora pop up, as fans complained the merchandise for the characters was missing from stores, or they didn’t appear in group shots with their respective teams on various items. Kevin Feige has heard the complaints, and in an interview with Slashfilm, addressed the issue and vowed to do something about it.
“That was very frustrating for us, because we see, we see it from the other side. When I say we, I mean the filmmakers, because we’re presented with the stuff that’s being made, and I don’t know if there’s an absolutely equal sampling, but Black Widow was all over that. Gamora was all over that stuff. What we don’t see is how much of it is in any given store,” Feige said. “How easy is one piece of merchandise to find versus another piece of merchandise. So, we see the stuff and we go, oh great, these are all our characters, they’re all great represented, they’re all going to be sold, and then we find out, oh, you can’t find this, you can’t find that, or there’s lunch boxes or a backpack where a certain character is not on it, and I think the outrage was great, because that’s not going to happen anymore.”
Even with this new effort, even the almighty Marvel only has so much influence. Namely, they can’t really tell Toys ‘R Us what to stock.
“We can’t have sway over what a retail store, how many items of what they want to stock on a shelf, but when toy sets come over, or t-shirt designs come over, if they’re not represented properly or representative of the film — we’re not even saying, ‘Is the equality of each gender specific?’, we’re going, ‘Does it represent the movie we’re making?’ — and if it doesn’t, we send it back until it does,” he said.
You have Feige’s word and we’ll see how that plays out when merchandise for their movies lands this year. However, a normalized perception of female superheroes would certainly be aided if female characters were able to lead their own movies, something that won’t happen at Marvel until 2019’s “Captain Marvel“….