The way that women and men are represented in media can affect our gender roles perception, while the stereotypical representation of women in media can lead to accepting that kind of behavioral patterns. In the recent times, it can be noticed that there are much more women in leading roles of action heroines, especially in genres that are not typically feminine, such as action or science-fiction genre. Movies, The Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, that are analyzed in this master thesis, also belong to the genre of science fiction and have women in the roles of leading heroines. The main goal of this master thesis was to find out how is the gender represented in movies Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: Force Awakens, by focusing on the combination of visual and verbal features of the movie with the main focus on the leading actresses. For the purposes of this master thesis, I have been using the multimodal access to critical discourse analysis because it is most appropriate for analyzing media text such as film, which is considered as a classical example of multimodal discourse that is composed of images, text, sound and music. In the selected films, I have also analyzed the representation of female characters compared to male characters. Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force awakens certainly turn their attention to gender issues and their leading heroines are providing women the new role models that does not represent them in the roles of a housewife or a victim. In this case, women are represented as self-sufficient and powerful, capable of fighting for themselves and for their own rights, while men are embracing their humanity. Even thought these two movies can be certain kind of indicators of gender equality, women emancipation and different representation of the leading female characters, it is only a small shift in developing public awareness as well departure from the traditional (stereotipically) female roles. G