Look at any big action hero, from Batman to Captain America, and you won’t find a character who needs to assert that his maleness makes him powerful or worthy. You won’t hear an anthem close out their movies with lyrics like, “I’m a mother-fucking man, baby, alright / I don’t need a woman to be holding me tight.” (That is, of course, a flipped version of Kesha’s “Woman,” which closes Birds of Prey.) Despite years of this conversation , we’re still at the start of women-led and women-created major action tentpoles — you can count the major female superhero films before BOP on one hand. And though Birds of Prey’s admittedly modest sales still made it the number-one movie in the world on opening weekend, most headlines about its box office cull were that it couldn’t outpace its male-led counterparts in the DC canon (it’s also reportedly why the film now technically has a new title in certain theaters, Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey ). Our gender still feels like a novelty in this space, but Hodson is optimistic that it won’t always be like this.