It’s International Women’s Day, so it’s the perfect time to discuss the most high-profile female super hero and the terrible collapse of her film. It’s kind of fantastically appropriate actually, no matter how powerful a woman is there’s always some guy ready to knock her down and say she doesn’t matter.
Pretty much no one was happy when DC and Warner Bros killed the Wonder Woman movie a few years that was to be written and directed by Joss Whedon, universally accepted as the most perfect person for the job. What hasn’t been known until now is just how Whedon lost the gig, but thanks to an interview with Deadline the story has finally been told.
“It’s not easy. It’s not a simple trick. The Marvel properties with the exception of Batman, who has often been described as the Marvel character in the DC universe, are much easier to translate to a modern audience. Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern are so far above us and their powers are amorphous and that makes it 10 times harder.
Even when you’re doing a fight, it’s harder to write a fight for Thor than it is for Captain America because he’s that much stronger. I loved what I was doing on Wonder Woman. Clearly I was an excited party of one. I wrote the movie, I felt good about the characters, the structure needed work, I did another outline, they read it and were done. There wasn’t even a phone call.”
Seriously. He handed in the second draft and they just never called him back. Of course, DC/WB’s letting Whedon go freed him up to head over to Marvel/Disney and make the third highest grossing film of all time, featuring a truly fantastic version of Black Widow.
Though fans are still waiting for that Wonder Woman movie.
