Warner Bros. ended up playing a masterstroke by backing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The female-centric movie dominated the box office for weeks and became the first movie solo-directed by a woman to cross the $1 billion mark.
Gerwig managed a very commendable feat that should further pave the way for women-oriented narratives to make their mark on a grander scale. Impressively, this wasn’t a very new experience for Warner Bros., who enjoyed a similar level of success by joining hands with Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman. The movie grossed $822 million worldwide.
We don’t really know how hard it was for Gerwig to get the nod for her script, but the ride to make a real difference in the DC Extended Universe was certainly very tricky and long for Jenkins.
Why Wonder Woman Director Patty Jenkins Had to Wait for Over a Decade to Work With Warner Bros.
As DCEU approaches its culmination period with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the 15th and the final installment of the franchise, there’s not much for Warner Bros. to look back with pride, making the success of Wonder Woman stand out even more.
Patty Jenkins combined to great effect with Gal Gadot to deliver the 2017 blockbuster, which also received an encouraging response from critics for aptly bringing the exploits of Princess Diana of an all-female Amazonian race to the fore. Wonder Woman seamlessly flies at incredible speeds in the movie, but when it came to taking the project off the ground, Jenkins’ experience was anything but seamless.
During a round table discussion for The Hollywood Reporter, the 52-year-old, while sharing her thoughts on picking the right project, revealed that she had been in talks with Warner Bros. for collaboration since 2005, but had to wait for more than a decade to finally find the suitable conditions she was looking for to transform her vision into a movie. She said:
“My story to get in [to Warner Bros.] was a long story because I had first talked to them about it in like 2005, and there were so many different chapters of why they were and when they weren’t going to make it.”
After more than a decade-long wait, their visions finally aligned, opening doors for Wonder Woman to dominate the box office.
“By the time that they came back and they had realized they wanted to do something which was very similar to what I’d been saying I wanted to do for a long time, it was a much different conversation,” she recalled (via The Hollywood Reporter).
She also drew parallels between a relationship and partnership for a movie, insisting it’s very important to pick the right projects for young filmmakers to avoid ending up in a bad marriage.
Why James Gunn Supposedly Scrapped the Idea of Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman 3
Jenkins returned to her director’s chair for Wonder Woman 1984, but the Gadot-led movie failed to replicate the success of the original DCEU movie, grossing just $169 million globally at the box office.
However, such has been the character’s legacy that many fans expected to see a third Wonder Woman movie, and according to industry scooper CanWeGetSomeToast, Jenkins and Gadot also had similar ideas, only for DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn to step in and change the plans. The X user stated:
“Pre-strikes, #WonderWoman3 was supposed to shoot this summer with a script by Patty Jenkins that Gal really liked. Jenkins was obviously returning to direct, but James Gunn scrapped her script entirely because he thought her take didn’t fit with where he wanted to take Wonder Woman in the DCU.”
Accordingly, it’s best to assume that we won’t see any involvement from Jenkins should Gunn decide to bring back Gadot’s character in the DCU.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, CanWeGetSomeToast
