Angelina Jolie Is The First Blockbuster Female Action Movie Star

Angelina Jolie has been many things in her film acting career, including an Oscar winner and a director who specializes in “the kind of films that otherwise would never get made absent her capital” like The Land of Blood and Honey and By the Sea. But as her name dominates the headlines for reasons I’m not going to discuss here, I’d like to reference a different portion of her career, something I was planning on discussing in December in the run-up to Rogue One. She was, almost from the beginning, an honest-to-goodness female action hero.
                 

As in, she was a movie star whom audiences paid to see as a big-screen action star. She wasn’t just an actress who happened to star in an action movie or two. No, she built up a steady stream of action-specific blockbusters where at least part of the draw was seeing Jolie kicking a** and blowing stuff up.

And for many/most actresses, they were lucky to get one action franchise (Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill, Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld, Jennifer Lawrence’s Hunger Games, etc.) as part of a career that alternated between starring/supporting vehicles in other genres and supporting roles in male-driven action movies (Michelle Rodriguez, Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, etc.).

That she did it while making dramas like A Mighty Heart and The Changeling only masked the notion that she was basically a female equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger during an era when old-school action stars were going out of fashion.