Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s third Wonder Woman movie won’t be moving forward at DC Studios, The Hollywood Reporter reports. News of the decision to pass on the sequel—which had just had a treatment handed in by Jenkins, describing what she’d like to do with the franchise moving forward—comes as newly minted DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran prepare for what’s expected to be one hell of a slate-clearing meeting next week, laying out their plans for the embattled superhero franchise to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
Gadot and Jenkins’ take on Wonder Woman has operated at a frankly baffling number of levels in the DC movie hierarchy over the years: First introduced in 2016 with Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, the character’s first solo outing was a ray of hope in 2017, suggesting that the DC movies could operate in palettes beyond Zack Snyder’s particular washed-out vision of superherodom. (It also made nearly as much movie as Dawn on about half the budget.) But then came the debacle surrounding Snyder’s replacement on Justice League—with Gadot reportedly not happy about Joss Whedon’s conduct on the movie’s set—followed by the ridiculousness that Wonder Woman 1984 was subjected to, kicked across the pandemic film schedule like a very shiny soccer ball before finally splatting to the ground (and VOD) in late December 2020.
Jenkins has maintained her commitment to the character through it all; one can assume she was hoping that Gunn and Safran, who were named as the new heads of DC Studios last month, would bite on keeping this incarnation of the character on the table as they work to salvage the DC movies brand. (Which, we feel moved to note for like the hundredth time, only look acutely bad, money-wise, when compared to the staggering and unprecedented success of Disney’s Marvel movies; they’d be basically fine in most other environments.) Jenkins apparently co-wrote the treatment for Wonder Woman 3 with Geoff Johns, the co-creator of DC Studios (then DC Films).
Per THR, Gunn and Safran supposedly told Jenkins that her Wonder Woman 3 plans “did not fit in with the new (but still unfolding) plans.” THR notes that, despite David “Buzzsaw” Zaslav’s reputation as a penny-pincher, the decision to step away from Wonder Woman 3 apparently wasn’t about money; Gunn and Safran are reportedly being given a pretty free hand with spending as they lay out their plans for a new DCEU.