With International Women’s Day falling on 8 March, we thought we’d highlight some of its year's movies that showcase empowering women characters. From resilient romantics to Disney dynamos, here are the hardy heroines appearing on a big screen near you in 2025...
1. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (showing now)
Helen Fielding’s hapless heroine Bridget Jones may not be the first person that springs to mind when thinking about strong female characters, but let’s look at the evidence – not only does Bridget (Renée Zellweger) manage to effortlessly bat away the countless cringeworthy scrapes that she gets herself into, but she does so while attracting the interest of some of Hollywood’s most swoonsome leading men.
In Michael Morris’s hilarious final instalment in the popular franchise – now showing at Cineworld – Bridget is a widowed mum-of-two following the death of her husband Mark Darcy. But it isn’t long before she’s back in the dating game and grabbing the attention of two different men: a youthful park ranger named Roxter (Leo Woodall), and a science teacher named Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Of course, Bridget's old flame Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is on hand to dispense NSFW advice.
What could possibly go wrong?
BOOK BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY TICKETS
2. Disney’s Snow White (from 21 March)
Disney’s original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs movie (1937) saw the titular princess being rescued from evil by a prince’s kiss. But Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White in Marc Webb’s dazzling reboot, was keen to give her character a much more independent spirit.
“She’s not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” she told Variety. “She’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.”
The question is, will her dreams come to fruition, or will she succumb to the movie’s other strong female character, the Evil Queen (played with delicious menace by Gal Gadot)? There’s only one way to find out…
3. Thunderbolts* (from 2 May)
From Black Widow to Carol Danvers, Marvel has always championed strong female superheroes. On 2 May, highly trained spy/assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) comes blasting in with her fellow Thunderbolts team.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen Belova in action – she appeared alongside her adopted sister Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the 2021 film Black Widow. However, it’s the first time that she’s been granted this much screen time, and, given her exceptional skillset and awesome fighting ability, viewers are in for a real treat.
As yet, we don’t know much about Thunderbolts*’ plot, but Pugh is joined by a sparkling cast that includes David Harbour, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel Weisz and Harrison Ford, who variously appeared in Black Widow and the recent Captain America: Brave New World. Director Jake Schreier’s superhero blockbuster promises to be a cracker.
4. From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (from 7 June)
When a movie title is prefaced with the words “From the World of John Wick”, you know it’s going to be packed with bone-crunching fight sequences. Such is the case with Len Wiseman’s Ballerina, in which a young dancer (Ana de Armas) trains as an assassin to avenge her father’s death.
Revenge movies featuring female leads are nothing new, but few can match the sheer ferocity of Ballerina’s chief protagonist as she swaps pirouettes for punches to devastating effect. Speaking of John Wick, Keanu Reeves does make a cameo in this film, along with a whole bunch of other screen legends and John Wick franchise veterans (including Gabriel Byrne, Anjelica Huston and Ian McShane).
But, make no mistake, the spotlight belongs to Ana de Armas (remember, she already wowed us all as Paloma in the James Bond movie No Time To Die), and she’s in no mood to hand it over.
5. Jurassic World Rebirth (from 2 July)
We all know that in a fight between a dinosaur and a human being, there’s only going to be one winner. But you stand a much better chance of surviving a dino-infested landscape if you’re made of stern stuff – and the lead character in Gareth Edwards’ forthcoming blockbuster Jurassic World Rebirth most certainly is.
Played by Scarlett Johansson, covert operations expert Zora Bennett leads a small team onto a forbidden island that was once the research facility for Jurassic Park, in search of dinosaur DNA that’ll help in the manufacture of a life-saving drug.
What Zora and her compatriots (including Johansson's co-stars Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali), don’t realise is that the island is still occupied – by mutated, and entirely terrifying, dino experiments. Resembling a latter-day Lara Croft (at least from the trailer), Zora will have you on the edge of your seat with her swashbuckling attempts to save the day. As heroic as she is, though, we can’t help feeling that she could’ve saved herself an awful lot of trouble by staying at home.
6. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (from 25 July)
In much the same way as John, Paul, George and Ringo had to share the limelight in The Beatles, Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm / Invisible Woman is but a quarter of the titular superhero team in Matt Shakman’s new Marvel blockbuster. We've waited a long time for the Fantastic Four to make their MCU debut and it's now a reality with Kirby joined by Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm and Eben Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm.
Sue and her superhero family are battling to save the world from the evil Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his sidekick the Silver Surfer. Kirby was impressed by her character, too, not least because Sue Storm is a mother as well as a superhero. “I was so blown away by Sue,” she told ComicBookMovie.com. “Through all the comics through all the decades, the fact she's a mother and is so fiercely feminine...she's maternal but so badass."
Looking for more movie inspiration this year? Check out our list of the 25 most unmissable movies hitting Cineworld screens in 2025.
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