With the impending release of DC’s Wonder Woman, the studio is hoping for a surefire hit to get their extended universe back on track. Patty Jenkins‘ film has a bit of pressure on it, but it could have been made years ago with a familiar comic book face in the directors chair instead.
Years before he became a household name due to helming the two Avengers films, Joss Whedon submitted a script for his own Wonder Woman film but had it rejected, and he’s yet to forget how much it hurt:
“I worked really hard on that movie and it meant a lot. But I don’t know if what I was trying to do would fit in with what [the studio’s] vision is. I had a take on the film that, well, nobody liked… We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that’s never gonna work”.
Speaking with Empire magazine, Whedon mentioned how his story was very different than the one Jenkins and her team will bring to the silver screen – in his iteration, Diana left her home of Themyscira with Steve Trevor shortly after the two became friends. They would leave to give aid to refugees, but Diana would run into plenty of trouble in Trevor’s hometown of Gateway City.
Whedon had previously revealed his vision for the character in a 2011 interview:
“She was a little bit like Angelina Jolie. She sort of traveled the world”.
“She was very powerful and very naïve about people, and the fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my way into her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we 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'”.
Whedon ultimately left the project and it seemed for a while that no female superhero, let alone Wonder Woman, would get her own solo comic book movie. Hopefully the upcoming release is a big success and adds to the studios confidence that female-driven superhero films can be just as wildly successful as their male counterparts. Whedon, for his part, is willing the film to do well:
“I want it to be good. The trailer was just wonderful. I’ll probably be disappointed, me more than anybody else, because I’ll be like, ‘Wow, my version…’ or whatever, but I can still get myself up for it. The trailer had her shield and her fire hammer and yep, I’m good, this will be fine, everything is good. Such an image”.
Wonder Woman stars Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright and David Thewlis, and will be released Friday, June 2.
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