I didn't see Tomb Raider because it looked like a genuinely bad movie, and by all accounts I care about, I was absolutely right. But I was interested in it initially, due to the casting news coming shortly after seeing Ex Machina. I didn't see Alita because nothing about it seemed interesting to me. I saw Wonder Woman in spite of it being tied to major franchise. I have no interest in the DCEU and never have, but Wonder Woman looked genuinely good. And it was. I saw Captain Marvel in part because it was part of a franchise I'm invested in, but also in part because it looked good. But then there's other woman-led films, such as Annihilation and Arrival, that rank among my absolute favorite films in years. Neither are exactly mainstream IPs.
In other words, there's not any trend here that can be determined based off of my own personal choices to see these movies, beyond "it looks good/bad". But to go beyond simply myself, as overall my film viewing habits aren't significant, the entire argument is a poor one, because of course in general woman-led franchise films are going to be more successful than woman-led non-franchise films. As a general rule franchise films do better than other films. That in itself is worth talking about, the continuous shift towards franchise films as studios ever-increasingly center their output around expensive, brand-centric films with smaller overall outputs, but the article seems to imply that this is something unique to films with more diverse leads when I don't really see a case for that.
As a side note, it's also weird to name-drop Tomb Raider, when it was an IP that was able to find significant success in film in the past (and continued success in videogames), and continues to be a known entity. It's problem quite obviously wasn't "people don't know it/it's not a franchise film, so they didn't see it".
