Related to that, what's really weird is Disney having all these boy related properties like Star Wars and Pirates, and purchasing the likes of Star Wars specifically to sell toys to boys, only to then try and frame said franchises around female leads in an attempt to get more girls. I mean, they literally had the girls market covered already, lol.
Boys will keep buying action figures and investing in traditionally male-oriented franchises, and will even buy female action figures if the product is interesting and cool enough, and girls will invest in the product in greater numbers... provided you create interesting female lead characters and don’t succumb to bad writing, or worse, contradictory and self-defeating writing.
...which is what Star Wars had in the Sequel Trilogy, especially once The Last Jedi undid all the goodwill and investment people had in the “woke”-style protagonists of Rey (the female lead) and Finn (the black male lead), by sticking Rey in a blandly sexist and insultingly stupid story obsessed with Adam Driver’s looks over the character he was playing, and shuffling Finn off into a dumb sideplot of a sideplot, while trying to replace him with both Kylo and Sad!Luke. TROS just kept to those premises in terms of prioritization, even as it tried t9 adjust everything else, which defeated the whole point and purpose of not just casting Ridley and Boyega as the leads, but in the characters themselves.
Pirates can easily afford a female lead... but they do need a good plot, a good story, and focus in characterization. Elizabeth Swan is still arguably a great character who overshadows both her son and all the villains, because they wrote her well and even when the sequels got shaky, kept a clear focus in what her character was. Pirate King Elizabeth didn’t get any complaints; people could see the girl power messaging, but she had the badass credentials and gravitas to keep people from whining.
Give the audience a good female pirate lead, and people won’t whine anywhere near as much. Just don’t do anything stupid, like, say... trying to have her crush on the murderous Neo-Nazi who tortured and violated her mind, murdered her paternal figure, and named her friend, and all because he says “It’s my teacher’s fault!”
It shouldn’t be that hard... but for some people, it is.
