Last week, playing catch-up, Marvel announced it was making a Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel stand-alone movie, with the star TBD. (Marvel and DC have both also blatantly failed to feature male minority superheroes in their films, even though Wesley Snipes’s vampire franchise Blade kicked off the second wave of comic-book movies. In tandem with the announcement of Captain Marvel, Marvel announced a Black Panther movie to star breakout actor Chadwick Boseman, too.)

The news was greeted as if the new movies represented a great, if overdue, leap forward — or would represent a great leap, anyway, in the eventual future. Wonder Woman won’t debut in Batman v Superman for another year and a half, and Wonder Woman is slated for 2017. (Gadot will also star as the superheroine in The Justice League Part One later that year.) Captain Marvel won’t get the jump on Wonder Woman: She’s scheduled for summer of 2018. The studios deny that they were shamed into making these women-led movies, or that they succumbed to pressure from the public or each other. Marvel’s Kevin Feige claimed that a Captain Marvel movie “has been in the works almost as long as Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy … and one of the key things was figuring out what we wanted to do with it.” This, though, was obvious backtracking; the statement came only three months after Feige said he was not going to be “swayed by the backlash” against the lack of women and minorities in Marvel’s upcoming films.

A look at how female comic-book superheroes have been handled by studios doesn’t inspire much confidence that those studios know “what to do” with them now. 20th Century Fox fumbled the X-Men movies, a Marvel franchise built around diversity and inclusiveness, by primarily focusing on the white male cast members. In the comics, the X-Men are a stronghold of great female characters, and ostensibly an ensemble piece, but the movies have been the Hugh Jackman–as-Wolverine show since day one. In the comics’ “Days of Future Past” saga, it’s Kitty Pryde who travels back in time and does all the cool stuff. But in this past summer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past on the big screen, it was Wolverine, while Ellen Page’s Kitty was relegated to psychic mission control and got barely any screen time. How can movies based on comic books be so much less progressive and inclusive than the comics themselves, which are decades old?