Here comes Dr. Cosmic with his heroines have different tropes than male heroes stuff:
Katniss Everdeen isn't a superhero. She only kills three people in the Hunger Games, and one was a mercy killing. She loses every fight she gets in. Her body count in Catching Fire might even be smaller, iirc. Katniss kicking butt isn't what people care about or else no one would like the movies because they have so little of that. That's simply not what the most beloved heroines do, it's not why we like them.
Now if you're talking about a Wonder Woman who scarcely fights people and spends virtually all of her time hiding/running/surviving/being emotionally conflicted, then yeah, Katniss' popularity is a good benchmark. If not, then how is Katniss' popularity proof that a different type of character will be popular? How does that make sense?
To address the double standard: Katniss is proof that a female-led movie with some action in it can be popular, it is NOT proof that any female-led action movie can be equally popular. The fact that we have several quality female-led action movies (Kill Bill, Salt, Tomb Raider) that are only moderately popular shows that there are some female stories that resonate with a large audience, typically the types you see in YA books, for instance, and some that don't, typically the ones you see in B movies.
And this double standard goes both ways. Does anyone think Hunger Games would have been as popular with the genders flipped? Same story, just Katnik, Peelah and Gail as a triangle, this guy getting preened over trying to impress the Capital with his love story, which he's not very good at showing? And then getting into a few fights as he mostly hides from the career pack, and survives thanks to little Roo, sponsorship from Miss Haymitch and Peelah pretending she's with the Careers, and eventually gets his bow and arrow, and uses it to kill a grand total of two people, and one of those not even in a fight. Would it have been as popular if Peetah Mellark had been the central character, and it was a story about a boy trying to save an ornery little girl he's loved since he was little, who can fight better than he can, but still not all that well?
And then you have the effect where the same thing that causes lack of audience interest causes lack of crew interest, and makes for a worse film overall, that prevents a movie like Salt from being as good as a James Bond movie. I think we still live in a gender-coded society, and while we can argue what degree these expectations and roles are nature and what is nurture, we can even argue how just these expectations are, I think we can all agree they are there and they affect how movies are perceived.
So my question is: would you enjoy a Hunger Games/Terminator/Alien-type Wonder Woman, where she spends most of her time running and hiding from a threat/god that is simply too much for her to handle, where she survives, not by kicking butt with her super powers, but by wits and her relationships with others. Would that be interesting? Would that be Wonder Woman? Would WB ever do that?
