Merciful Minerva! Our lady Diana can’t be stopped: with a domestic box office now over $409 million, Wonder Woman‘s haul is has left every other superhero movie biting her dust save four.
Wonder Woman—whose success once seemed in doubt, a dark period I refer to as “the long, long ago”—is now the fifth biggest superhero of all time domestically. Per Comicbookmovie, Diana Prince & Co. have raked in so much cash that the only U.S. box offices that are bigger (for the moment) are “The Dark Knight Rises, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Dark Knight and The Avengers.”
This is freakin’ huge, my friends. Those other movies are now D.C. and Marvel’s most established and well-known properties, plus the follow-ups that built from the initial films’ massive success (I don’t think many of us would call Age of Ultron or The Dark Knight Rises pure triumphs of their own—they piggybacked off of the goodwill from the previous films’ reception). By contrast, many audiences had been total Wonder Woman agnostics going in and emerged converts for life.
Can we even begin to imagine what a cultural and financial event Wonder Woman 2 will be if the studio gets all the right pieces (by which I mean people like director Patty Jenkins) back into play? I don’t want Wonder Woman 2 to be an Age of Ultron, by which I mean overpacked and noisy. I want it to be more like Captain America: Winter Soldier—a sequel that builds on previously established mythos but its own unique film with a strong story and deeper character exploration. And considering that rumors say this go-round with Diana will be more of a Cold War era spy romp, I hope I don’t have to cross my fingers too hard. Make this happen, D.C. Let the creative team that made Wonder Woman such an unbridled delight and a global hit take the reins again.
With $803 million grossed worldwide, Wonder Woman is also, officially, the biggest movie of the summer. So summer 2017 can be referred to as The Season of Wonder Woman, the Dog Days of Diana Prince, or the Solstice of the Amazons. I’ll be over here waiting for the movie’s DVD release on September 19th. Give me ALL of the extras.
(via Comicbookmovie, image: Warner Bros./D.C.)
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