The Hunger Games was the first ever action movie to feature a female lead... apparently.
Jennifer Lawrence took part in a Variety interview alongside Viola Davis to discuss their careers and most recent projects, and the Causeway star raised a few eyebrows when she reflected on joining The Hunger Games franchise as Katniss Everdeen.
"I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work — because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead. And it just makes me so happy every single time I see a movie come out that just blows through every one of those beliefs, and proves that it is just a lie to keep certain people out of the movies. To keep certain people in the same positions that they’ve always been in."
Lawrence appears to be forgetting about a lot of films here, including the likes of Aliens, Terminator 2, Tomb Raider, The Long Kiss Goodnight - the list goes on.
We're going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was slightly misquoted, however, as we can't imagine Lawrence actually believes The Hunger Games was the first female-fronted action film, and it wouldn't be the first time an outlet - even a well-respected trade like Variety - spun an interview for a more clickable headline.
There's a chance she meant that studios generally don't bank on female-led blockbusters (or didn't at the time), which would be accurate enough, and there's no denying that the success of The Hunger Games movies did a lot to change this outlook.