Why "The Lady Adventurers Club" really should be a movie

Two posts ago, I wrote about founding the Sapphic Investment Film Fund...and how I wished "The Lady Adventurers Club" might one day be turned into a movie (yes, yes, I know it hasn't even been released as a book yet!). Over the weekend, I made a pitch packet for what it would look like to market it as a movie. In the immediate term, the packet is nothing more than an exemplar. I created it to help burgeoning filmmakers who may have never assembled a pitch packet before understand what sort of information an investor would want to see before seriously considering investment--things like loglines, synopses, timelines from pre-production to distribution, budget, terms of investment, etc.

But in the medium term, why shouldn't "The Lady Adventurers Club" become a movie? One of the most important things a pitch packet can contain is a page on comparables: what are similar movies to the one being pitched, what did they cost, and how much did they make? Yes, all the examples are cherry-picked, but it shows the type of profit range an investor might encounter. When trying to find comparables for a movie like "The Lady Adventurers Club," however, I discovered that there really aren't any. Look for an action/adventure movie with a female lead and you get things like "Mad Max: Fury Road," "Atomic Blonde," or "Wonder Woman"--you get a woman surrounded by a bunch of men. Look for a female ensemble and you get "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," "The First Wives Club," or "A League of Their Own."

When it comes to action/adventure movies, there are plenty of movies that feature an almost exclusively male cast (looking at you, "The Expendables"), but there's not really a female equivalent (nod to the recently released "The 355"). And when it comes to historical action with a female lead, there really aren't any. It's a genre from which women have been shut out on the big screen. So why not make "The Lady Adventurers Club" into a movie? There's definitely a market gap to be filled, and I think LAC would be a great way to do it. Will Hollywood ever do it? Well, ten years from now let's revisit the question. I'm an optimist.