Veteran film blogger says The Revenant too 'unflinchingly brutal' for women

Film blogger Jeffrey Wells has sparked outrage after suggesting that the forthcoming Leonardo DiCaprio film The Revenant will be unsuitable for female audiences due to its “unflinchingly brutal nature”.

After attending an early preview screening of the film, which follows the revenge mission of a trapper left for dead during the old American west and is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wells sent out a tweet with fulsome praise of the film, and finished by stating: “Forget women seeing this.”

Twitter users have called him “misogynist” and “sexist”. Wells defended himself on his Hollywood Elsewhere blog with a post headlined “Getting Clubbed Again By PC Twitter Goons Over Four Words”, saying he felt “like a wildebeest being surrounded and torn apart by hyenas or wild dogs”. Despite apologising for his formulation of words, Wells then said that a female friend who was at the screening with him, and who found the film difficult to watch, was “a total candy-ass”, and that his remark was based partly on what a male colleague had told him about his wife. Wells finished by condemning “Twitter fascists” and wrote: “It’s a fascist dictatorship out there, and if you don’t step very carefully you’ll be stabbed and clubbed and the dogs will lick your blood.”

This is not the first time Wells has triggered controversy. In a post about the trailer for Trainwreck, he criticised Amy Schumer’s looks, describing her as “Jennifer Aniston’s somewhat heavier, not-as-lucky sister”; he wrote: “Life would be heavenly and rhapsodic if women had the personality and temperament of dogs” in a post about the Neil LaBute play Reasons to Be Pretty; and Deadline leaked a 2007 email in which he asked 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold for topless photos of Vinessa Shaw.