Is Wonder Woman cursed for film and TV? T hat's what The Hollywood Reporter openly wondered after Michelle MacLaren ( Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) and Warner Bros. cited "creative differences" to explain why the Gal Gadot Wonder Woman movie due out June 23rd 2017 no longer had a director. That director's chair didn't stay empty for very long, with Warner Bros. hiring Patty Jenkins (Monster) mere days after MacLaren's departure. It's a weird situation since Jenkins has actually been on the opposite side of this before, walking away from Thor: The Dark World during pre-production, later replaced by Alan Taylor. It's even weirder since MacLaren's vision for the film apparently included Wonder Woman having a tiger sidekick/pet she could talk with (before you snicker, just know that at one point in the comics Wonder Woman could talk to animals, although now you can snicker about that if you want). However, it's ultimately more of the same, yet another person stepping up to the Wonder Woman plate with determination and optimism before eventually making the walk of shame back to the dugout as a dejected slugger who has just struck out.
Actually, that "more of the same" line is not completely true. Many men have been victimized by Wonder Woman's tumultuous film and TV development history; very few women have known such defeat, mostly just a couple of screenwriters in the early 2000s (Becky Johnson, Laeta Kalogridis) and now Michelle MacLaren. She was hired because key people over at Warner Bros. believe Wonder Woman's strong association with the notion of female empowerment begs for an authentic female voice behind the camera, even though Zack Snyder is technically getting the first crack at Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The mere act of hiring MacLaren for the job was itself a sign of female empowerment, setting her up as the first woman to direct a big-budget, CG-laden tentpole release. Now that honor has fallen to Jenkins, but some would call it a giant burden. Punisher: War Zone director Lexi Alexander told Fast Company she wanted no part in making Wonder Woman, "Imagine the weight on my shoulders. How many male superhero movies fail? So now, we finally get Wonder Woman with a female director; imagine if it fails. And you have no control over marketing, over budget. So without any control, you carry the f-ing weight of gender equality for both characters and women directors. No way."
It seems fitting, though, that so much of the conversation about the solo Wonder Woman movie is centered on what it represents (Finally, a female-led comic book movie, and, finally, a big budget movie directed by a woman) as opposed to what it'll actually be about. That's because if most people stop and think about it they'll probably realize they know very little about Wonder Woman the character. She first showed up in the comics in 1941 in the back of a team book ( All Star Comics) populated by established heroes, and less than a year later she starred in three different comic book series of her own. In those early years, she occasionally outsold Superman. She was the first and for many years only female member of the Justice League, sadly relegated to secretarial duties a lot of the time. She cemented her place as a feminist icon when Gloria Steinem put her on the first cover of Ms. Magazine in 1972. And many grown women fondly remember twirling in circles when they were little girls, re-enacting Lynda Carter's famous spin into costume in the campy old Wonder Woman TV show.
And, of course, it's become a kind of fun-fact for people to trot out, often in a "Did you know..." manner, that Wonder Woman was actually created by the guy who helped create the lie detector test, and he was a BDSM enthusiast living in a kinky relationship with two women.
Why She's So Difficult to AdaptBut what's Wonder Woman's real name? What's her origin story? Where she is from? Who are her main villains? Does she have a love interest? Why does she even fight crime? What motivates her to do that? And does she seriously fly an invisible plane?
Now, ask yourself all of those same questions about Superman and Batman (or Spider-Man on the Marvel side). It's a lot easier to do that with them, isn't it?
I am a lifelong geek, but just three years ago I couldn't have answered a single one of those questions for Wonder Woman. It's only because of the animated series Justice League/Justice League Unlimited that I can at least tell you her name (Diana Prince), place of origin (Paradise Island), basic backstory (Amazon island with no men, guy crashed there during WWII, told them about the Nazis, Diana was the only one compelled to leave the island and help the world of man in its fight against evil), one of her villains (Cheetah) and love interest (Steve Trevor). I can also somewhat sadly confirm that she does indeed fly an invisible plane. However, to the non-geeky Wonder Woman is "important and beloved as the most famous superheroine of all time, a bastion of female representation in a male-dominated genre, but she's a symbol more than a living, vibrant character [...]She's become a blank slate to which we attach our modern ideas." When the comic books recently paired her with Superman in a romantic relationship, it's very telling that headlines often went something like "You Won't Believe Who Superman's New Girlfriend Is!" instead of "Wonder Woman Has a New Boyfriend!" For that last one to be effective people would have to actually know that Wonder Woman had an old boyfriend.
And that, more or less, is why Wonder Woman is so difficult to adapt to film and TV. It's not just that although people are aware of her existence they don't know as much about her as they do Batman or Superman. A really good movie or TV show can make up for that, much in the way so many of us are now amateur experts about Iron Man whereas before the 2008 Iron Man movie we probably just knew how cool his suit looked. It's also not just that her traditional costume looks so remarkably impractical, although that doesn't help. Plus, there's the consistent DC bugaboo of struggling to make practical gods relatable. The main reason she's a challenge to adapt, though, is because the comics simply haven't done a good job of providing material worth adapting. As DC Entertainment President Diane Nielsen told THR:
That Time Joss Whedon Tried To Make a Wonder Woman Movie"We have to get her right, we have to. She is such an icon for both genders and all ages and for people who love the original TV show and people who read the comics now. I think one of the biggest challenges at the company is getting that right on any size screen. The reasons why are probably pretty subjective: She doesn't have the single, clear, compelling story that everyone knows and recognizes."
Nielsen emphasized that Wonder Woman was one of the top three priorities for DC and Warner Bros, but that "she's tricky." That would be an opinion shared by Joss Whedon, who was hired by producer Joel Silver in 2005 to write a feature length script. The inspiration for the project was actually the overwhelmingly positive fan response to Carrie Ann-Moss' character in The Matrix, and after several years with multiple other screenwriters and discarded screenplays Silver came to Whedon because of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Whedon took inspiration from the realization that he didn't actually know much about Wonder Woman, having mostly only encountered her in Justice League comic books. He was particularly hazy on her origin story, which is probably because her origin story has constantly shifted over the years. As summarized by WhatCulture, "Originally she was just a badass Amazonian warrior, helped out by her magic lasso and arm bands. That was retconned to suggest Diana was formed from clay by the Queen of the Amazons and was imbued with the attributes of the Greek and Roman gods by Athena. Then people felt weird about that, and she was an Amazonian woman again, with her powers being blessing from Olympian deities."
Whedon looked at all of this and realized he'd rather write for Batman, "Batman is the only Marvel character in the DC universe. He's got the greatest rogues gallery ever, he's got Gotham City. The Bat writes himself. With Wonder Woman, you're writing from whole cloth, but trying to make it feel like you don't [...] She doesn't have good villains (Circe, Cheeta, Ares). So you pretty much have to start from scratch there."
Literal years went by without Whedon actually completing a script, instead continually updating story outlines. One by one, actresses with some connection to Whedon (Charisma Carpenter, Eliza Dushku Gina Torres) and many others without (Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock, Megan Fox) were publicly connected to the project, and Whedon was still struggling with finding his in to the character, "She's fascinating, very uncompromising and in her own way almost vulnerable. She's someone who doesn't belong in this world, and since everyone I know feels that way about themselves, the character clicked for me."
That makes it sound an awful lot like he simply did what Marvel eventually did with Thor, which is to turn it into a fish-out-of-water story. However, Thor used that device as a way to humble its hero and ultimately endear him to audiences, answering the question of "How do you make audiences care about a literal god?" with an obvious "You take his powers away and make him human." That's sort of what Whedon had in mind, though not exactly the same:
"The fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way let people starve and the way the world is run and she'd just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can't cope with it, I can't understand, people are insane. And ultimately her romance with Steve was about him getting her to see what it's like not to be a goddess, what it's like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there's nothing you can do about it. That was sort of the central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better."
He made it up to two drafts of a full script before Joel Silver and the studio decided it was best to part ways, Whedon later expressing frustration that no one appeared to really know what they wanted the movie to be thus leaving him completely in the dark. He wasn't just pointing fingers, though, turning the finger of blame toward himself in declaring that he didn't believe he'd quite written his definitive Wonder Woman script yet. Ultimately, his parting words on the subject likely echo what Warner Bros. and Michelle MacLaren just experienced, "We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that's never gonna work. The worst thing that can happen in this scenario is that the studio just keeps hammering out changes and the writer falls into a horrible limbo of development. These guys had the clarity and grace to skip that part."
What They Might Try With the Gal Gadot MovieSince Whedon moved on, DC has actually offered yet another origin story for Wonder Woman, starting over in the New 52 and revealing she's actually the secret daughter of Hippolyta and Zeus, thus making her a demigod who grew up completely unaware of her true parentage, kind of like Loki from Thor. This is another reason that you can make a convincing argument that what Warner Bros. needs to do with Wonder Woman is to simply make a better version of Thor, one in which Loki is the hero and not the villain. Even though they have now hired the woman who almost made Thor 2, Warner Bros. may have other ideas. They were reportedly considering a more Captain America: The First Avenger approach, making a period piece prequel to Batman v Superman depicting Wonder Woman leaving Paradise Island and living among humans pretty much since women got the right to vote in America. This may have been a point of contention between MacLaren and the studio, or it may simply be a rumor with no resemblance to reality. It may also be related to the fact that Warner Bros. is reportedly developing the movie on a dual track with competing screenplays between written simultaneously, one either winning out over the other or the two combining into some Frankenstein's monster in the end.
I am of the opinion that their model should be Thor, but Forbes' Scott Mendelson begs to differ, "Don't just make a glorified ' Thor with breasts' action adventure film. Make a Wonder Woman movie that could arguably only be made by a female filmmaker, with a story that would only make sense when applied to a female superhero, with ideas about ideologies that explicitly deal with what it's like to be a woman in America in 2017. And just as importantly, make Gal Gadot into the biggest, boldest, grandest female superhero Hollywood has ever seen on the big screen. Wonder Woman, with the most famous and most iconic female superhero in modern literature, offers the chance to give the young women (and young men) something truly super-heroic to aspire to. Princess Diana, as a fiercely feminist and unapologetically female warrior with true superpowers and a desire to jump headlong into the fire to pull us out, would truly be something special come June 23rd 2017."
That all sounds fantastic. Making it a reality, though, well, not even Joss Whedon could pull that off. Now, it's Patty Jenkins' turn.
Sources: Wonder Woman Unbound by Tim Hanley, Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale, WhatCulture, Forbes
