David S. Goyer is the screenwriter behind Warner Bros. only successful DC character adaptations of the last ten years, the person who’s been putting words in the mouths of Batman and Superman for a while now. Yesterday he took to Reddit to answer questions from one and all, and was asked who of DC’s heroes he’d like to tackle next. His only answer?
Wonder Woman.
Goyer doesn’t give us much of a sense of what his take on the Amazon would be like. Though, when separately asked why he thought there hadn’t been a Wonder Woman movie yet, he responded:
I think Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to crack. More difficult than Superman, who is also more difficult than Batman. Also, a lot of people in Hollywood believe that it’s hard to do a big action movie with a female lead. I happen to disagree with that. But that tends to be the prevailing wisdom. Hopefully, that’ll change in the next few years. Who should play her? No idea…
I’m not immediately alarmed by the notion that Wonder Woman is a “difficult” character, though I can can understand why folks would be. There’s a perception that you see cropping up again and again when the idea of a Wonder Woman show or movie is brought up, that Wonder Woman is more difficult than other superheroes because her origin is “complicated” (which it isn’t, really), her personality is hard to pin down (ditto), or her costume is outdated (whose isn’t?). To be honest I think Superman is actually the most difficult to translate to screen in this day and age, when we’ve been consuming and supporting the gritty anti-hero (for better or for worse) for a few decades and feel that a character with unsullied and optimistic motivations is kids fare or “simplistic.”
But in the context of “difficulty of repackaging the character for a mainstream, international, wide interest” audience, then yeah. Making a commercially successful Wonder Woman movie that’s true to the character would be by far the most difficult. But not that’s not the fault of Wonder Woman. It’s the fault of our current mainstream culture. You only have to look at the general reaction to the word “feminism” to see how studios might balk at an action movie with direct and obvious women’s empowerment themes. That’s a story that would have to at the bottom be very good, at the middle present itself to Warner Bros. very precisely, and then would still have to fight tooth and nail to actually get made. Could Goyer actually create such a screenplay?
Well, on the very slim chance that he ever gets offered the opportunity, ask me again after I see Man of Steel.
(Digital Spy via Reddit.)
