Holding Out For A Hero
YOU MIGHT THINK, GIVEN THE universal love for Wonder Woman, that her 2017 debut solo feature film was surely just something that was simply long-overdue or delayed.
“Nobody thought that it would succeed,” director Patty Jenkins says, matter-of-factly, sitting with SFX in a swanky LA hotel. “There were very low expectations. Everybody thought a woman superhero wouldn’t succeed.”
Yet here we are, just a few years later, with the sequel Wonder Woman 1984 arguably the most highly anticipated superhero movie of 2020. That anticipation has only grown, given its slight delay due to world affairs.
“This one had new pressure,” Jenkins grins, “which is, ‘Can you follow up, can you do it again?’ It’s a very familiar state of being.”
Did Jenkins herself not expect the success and worldwide adoration that the original generated? “I was not expecting it,” she stresses. “I was hoping for it to succeed. I was surprised by what kind of thing it became. It became so powerful and for a little while I was surprised by that.” She notes at one point that they went into the first movie “with 100% of the industry thinking that it could not succeed, and that women couldn’t direct action.”
A box office of $822 million and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93% suggests Jenkins proved a few people wrong. And, SFX offers, it seems to have – finally – become a long-overdue turning point for female superheroes.
“I’d like to think,” Jenkins agrees. “I’m so overjoyed about that, because I definitely knew that it would be a massive negative if it had failed. So the fact that its success turned into a big positive for other people is so awesome.” Now it seems impossible to consider a Wonder Woman movie not being a success. But, to people like, it’s almost an alien concept that such a thing would have been up for discussion.
