There’s never a boring week with Warner Bros. Discovery. Ever since WB and Discovery merged, we’ve been getting all kinds of news from WB’s titles – especially their most valuable IPs, which involve the world-famous superheroes from the Justice League. The last casualty from the restructuring of the DC universe seems to be Wonder Woman 3, which is not yet considered dead but might have lost its director and screenwriter Patty Jenkins. Earlier reports suggested that Wonder Woman’s future was compromised due to James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new developments for the DC universe, but new stories are contradicting this version.
Yesterday, The Wrap reported that Jenkins has walked off the project on her own, and reportedly this has to do with the fact that the filmmaker’s vision for the third entry in the film series didn’t match Warner Bros. Film Group Co-Chairpersons and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy’s. Last week, Jenkins delivered her treatment of the Wonder Woman 3 script, and De Luca and Abdy didn’t feel like it worked. The Wrap also reports that the duo “didn’t get” the script, and didn’t like the direction that the franchise was going. So they asked Jenkins to consider pitching a different idea.
Jenkins' Way or The Highway
It got heated. One insider stated that Jenkins’ position was that De Luca and Abdy knew “they were wrong, that they didn’t understand her, didn’t understand the character, didn’t understand character arcs and didn’t understand what Jenkins was trying to do.” Jenkins also added that she wasn’t interested in pitching another version of the movie, and her script treatment was the only one she wanted to do. To stress her point, Jenkins reportedly included a Wikipedia link that explained the concept of “character arc” to De Luca.
What does James Gunn Have to Do With Wonder Woman 3?
As to Gunn and Safran, the report says they did agree that Jenkins’ script didn’t work, but it wasn’t their decision to kill the project or change Wonder Woman’s future. Even though the duo is responsible for reshaping the future of DC in cinema with a ten-year plan, there are some titles that they are instructed not to touch – the ones that have been doing fine on their own, which includes Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folié à Deux, J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Black Superman, and Wonder Woman was included in that slate.
At this point, Jenkins has provided no official statement about her future in the Wonder Woman universe, and right now it’s all up in the air. If Jenkins indeed left the project, Warner Bros. Discovery will have to find new directors and screenwriters for the project and basically start from scratch, which means we won’t get a new Wonder Woman movie any time soon.
The Future of DC Superheroes Is Still Fuzzy
Creative differences are a pretty common ground that, more often than not, cause big minds to walk away from huge projects from studios. Jenkins herself famously walked away from Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, as well as Edgar Wright from Ant-Man, Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: a Star Wars Story, and many, many others before them. Jenkins is also known for standing her ground: In a recent interview to The Hollywood Reporter, Charlize Theron (who worked with the director on Academy Award-winning drama Monster) called her “a fucking pitbull” and stated that the director fought tooth and nail to make the movie the way she wanted.
This issue with Wonder Woman 3 only makes the future of DC’s flagship superheroes more unclear, which is something that the studio has been struggling with for the last several years. Gunn and Safran’s hiring is an attempt to create a unified cinematic universe and give all projects a north star, but for now they’re all adrift – especially when you consider that the future of Black Adam, Aquaman and even Superman are also not looking too bright.
The next installment of the DC universe that is set to hit theaters is Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which premieres on March 17. You can watch the trailer below: