Wonder Woman Finally Making It to the Big Screen? By: Delaney Auth

Wonder Woman Finally Making It to the Big Screen?

By: Delaney Auth

Well, it looks like Warner Brothers may finally give us a Wonder Woman movie. Actress Gal Gadot has reportedly been signed to a three movie contract to play our favorite crime fighting Amazon, the first two films being the upcoming sequels to Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel, one titled Batman V. Superman: The Dawn of Justice, which is currently slated to hit theaters, 2016 and the other a Justice League film possibly coming a year after. The third movie, May 6^th according to a leaked Warner Brothers schedule, could be a Wonder Woman solo act, assuming that audiences receive her well, and would come out just two months after the second Justice League film. None of this is quite for sure, it will depend on the success of the Justice League franchise as well as Gal Gadot’s portrayal of the badass Diana Prince (Wonder Woman’s civilian identity for those who are less familiar with the comics).

However if this does happen, it could be a very big win for DC. So far their rival company, Marvel, has outshone them when it comes to female heroes on the big screen. While DC really has none to speak of so far, Marvel has featured Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson, in The Avengers, as well as Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Johansson will reprise her role in the upcoming film Avengers: Age of Ultron. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy featured Zoe Saldana as the green-skinned assassin Gamora and the X-Men franchise has included plenty of female “mutants”, such as Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), Storm (Halle Berry), Rogue (Anna Paquin), and Mystique (Rebecca Romijn/Jennifer Lawrence), among others. Unfortunately, none of these heroines have gotten their own movies; they all serve as supporting characters while male superheroes take the lead roles. However, if Warner Brothers comes through with this Wonder Woman movie, we could be moving to change that.

Wonder Woman is arguably the most famous female superhero in the DC universe. But while there have been multiple pushes and suggestions for a movie starring the Amazonian princess, the only time she has been portrayed on the big screen so far was in 2014’s Lego Movie. She was voiced by How I Met Your Mother and Avengers actress, Cobie Smulders.

In 2001, Todd Alcott was approached by Silver Pictures and Warner Brothers to write a Wonder Woman screenplay and casting rumors went crazy, suggesting that a whole host of actresses were being looked at to play the part, including Megan Fox, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, and even current Goddess of the Music Industry, Beyoncé Knowles. After a few failed drafts, screenwriting duties were turned over to Laeta Kalogridis. Avengers director, Joss Whedon took over in 2005, but due to differences with the studio, he was unable to make up a completed draft and left the project in early 2007. The next screenwriters to be hired were Matthew Jennison and Bret Strickland, but they couldn’t cut the deal either and in 2010 Silver Pictures lost the rights to the character to DC Comics Entertainment. Aside from that attempt, there have been a few animated films featuring Wonder Woman that went straight to video, but nothing big until the Man of Steel sequel and start of Warner Brothers’ Justice League franchise coming in the next couple of years.

The most famous depiction of Wonder Woman outside of the comics was the Wonder Woman TV show starring Lynda Carter. The show was started by a made for television movie in 1974 that actually featured actress Cathy Lee Crosby as the lead. When it was picked up as a television show, major changes were made to make the series more accurate than the original movie. Lynda Carter was cast as the famous Amazon, fighting for justice in the era of World War II and then moving to a more current 1970’s setting. It ran for three seasons before it was cancelled in 1979.

Nothing particularly notable happened for Wonder Woman on television again until more recently. In 2011 a pilot for a Wonder Woman TV show was filmed starring Adrianne Palicki. The pilot bombed; it was cheesy and bad as many had expected it to be and it didn’t get picked up by the network. Other than being featured in some animated Justice League shows for kids, those attempts are all Wonder Woman has gotten in television.

So why has it been so hard for us to get a Wonder Woman movie or television show? Especially in the last few years, superhero movies have been hugely successful. Marvel’s overlapping network of films branching from The Avengers has done so well with audiences, not only have they begun to go in similar directions with the X-Men and Amazing Spiderman franchises, but DC has also started to imitate this idea with their plans for Man of Steel and Justice League. Television shows like Agents of Shield and the CW’s Arrow, focusing on the DC hero Green Arrow, have been successful, so much so that the CW just premiered The Flash as a spinoff of Green Arrow and it’s off to a promising start. We seem to have superhero fever, so why is there only one female superhero movie even in the works?

Seeing Wonder Woman portrayed on the big screen will be great. If we get a film where Wonder Woman is the leading hero that will be fantastic, but it is only one step. As the audience, we need to use this opportunity to show studios that we want to see more female superheroes. Women have had to fight their way into many different areas of focus over the last century or so and the fight isn’t over. Women make up a significant portion of the movie going audiences. We are comic book nerds, Sci-Fi fans, and action movie lovers. We should be featured in the movies and television shows we watch, but we aren’t. We don’t have a prominent female superhero in the mainstream yet. When a woman lands a supporting role as a hero, she is often left off of merchandise for fear that the target demographic, young boys, don’t want girls on their toys or clothing. I’m not kidding, Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy has been excluded from the line up on a significant chunk of the film’s merch, and so has Black Widow from The Avengers franchise. What kind of message does it send our youth that we don’t want boys and girls alike to look up to strong women, that we tell them from the start that boys don’t wear girls on their t-shirts or play with girl action figures?

 Let’s use this new Wonder Woman movie to change that. Studios need to be pushed to represent women in superhero films. They aren’t going to do it on their own because they make money at what they’re doing now. They need their audiences to tell them what we want to see. So let’s tell them.