It’s clear that Supergirl has a challenge ahead of it. There have been relatively few female-led superhero films, and their box office performance and reviews have been grim. Halle Berry earned a Razzie for her role in 2004's Catwoman, which currently stands at 9% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is considered one of the 10 biggest box office bombs of all time. There was also 2005's double whammy of Elektra and Aeon Flux . Even though the problem with these movies was that they were, in a word, terrible (and backed by a fraction of the budget of, say, Batman Begins), the industry clings to them as cautionary tales. Prior to Catwoman, Elektra, and Aeon Flux, it's hard to even recall other female superhero films save for 1984's Supergirl, which also isn't very good , nor did it perform at the box office. But there's an adage that what you put in is what you get back. If a studio were willing to properly invest in a female superhero film — get a great screenwriter, director, and special effects with a property fans truly care about— it might see a better return.“When there is less of something, each test case weighs more in a conclusion,” Sarah Schechter, one of Supergirl’s producers, tells Refinery29. “Fantastic Four not really working at the box office doesn’t mean people automatically go, ‘Oh, Batman vs. Superman isn’t going to work.’ When you don’t have [a history of quality retellings of a female superhero's story], you have more responsibility, and it’s overly weighted because you don’t have enough of a sample size.” In other words, no pressure.In an interview with The New York Times from October 16, Melissa Rosenberg, the showrunner of Netflix’s upcoming Jessica Jones series, recalled a movie producer saying that Catwoman and Elektra were proof that “women can’t open at the box office.” “I told him, ‘You just cited two not-very-good movies.’” A leaked email exchange between Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter and Sony CEO Michael Lynton, with the subject line “Female Movies", dated August 7, 2014, reveals a similar sentiment. It cites Elektra, Catwoman, and the 1984 Supergirl film as box office disasters. While Perlmutter doesn’t elaborate on the purpose for the list (it appears to be a continuation of a phone conversation), one can read between the lines. Even though there have been more than three male-led superhero flops, the stakes are much higher for each female outing.So far, the only superheroines who have appeared in successful movies have been surrounded by a bunch of superdudes: The Avengers, which grossed $1.5 billion worldwide at the box office, and the X-Men franchise ( $1.3 billion ). (Never mind that Katniss Everdeen — who, while not a superhero in the comics sense, is nothing if not super heroic — has propelled The Hunger Games films to a total box office gross of almost $1.2 billion. At least there finally are female-led superhero blockbusters on the way: a Wonder Woman film is scheduled to hit theaters in 2017, and Captain Marvel will arrive in 2019. Rescuing these movies from development hell has been a herculean task, though. And DC Comics is priming the audience to be more receptive to Wonder Woman by introducing her in 2016's Batman vs. Superman.