Why Was Wonder Woman 3 Cancelled? You probably saw on your feeds that Wonder Woman 3 is basically dead in the water. There have been a bunch of news articles on most of the big movie sites. James Gunn, Warner Brothers, the new regime at Warner Brothers, had basically canceled all plans for Wonder Woman 3 as it is right now.
So I’ll explain what’s going on and what’s changed because there were a bunch of other big announcements, a bunch of big reveals about the future of DC movies. Just in general, it wasn’t just about Wonder Woman 3. Of course, I’ll do articles for everything as they continue to announce things because it’s a developing situation. There was this big opening salvo as Wonder Woman 3 was essentially killed, and it’s still going on now.
What James Gunn Had To Say About Wonder Woman 3 Cancellation And Future?
You probably saw Gal Gadot‘s post about the anniversary of her being cast as Wonder Woman. Because she was getting hyped up about telling people about Wonder Woman 3, and it was the version that she had been working on with Patty Jenkins for the past couple of years. She was like, “I can’t wait to show you the next chapter of Wonder Woman.”
Now that the Twitter account is poorly aged, things are posting it. Because like literally, the day after that is when they announced that Wonder Woman 3 had been canceled by Warner Brothers and James Gunn.
James Gunn gave a personal response to all the stuff that was posted about the big shake-up at DC. He said all the rumors that have been going on, some of the things are true, while some of the things are not true. This is actually probably good news for a lot of you out there that got really worried about it.
I don’t know whether to laugh at this. The last little bit here, too, he says, “some of the things we haven’t decided yet whether it’s true or not.” Meaning that some of the current slate is undecided, like they haven’t completely decided what to do with Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Henry Cavill‘s Superman, even though it sounds like they will probably wind up continuing in some fashion.
James Gunn Asks Fans To Wait
James Gunn goes on to say that although these first few months at DCU have been fruitful for them, building the stories and characters for the next ten years takes time, and they are still just beginning.
Then he went on to say that he and Peter chose to take on DC Studios, knowing that they were coming into a fractured environment, both in terms of the stories being told and the way the audience looked at DC itself. He said that it would definitely be an unavoidable transitional period as they move into telling a story that will spread across TV, animation, film, and gaming.
A big part of James Gunn’s plan chance for the new DC Universe is that everything is going to be Canon with each other for the most part. Not every single thing but most things across the movies, the TV shows, even the games for instance.
Gunn then goes on to say that some of the old stuff will continue, as I said. They know that they are not going to make every single person happy at every step of the process. But he promises that everything does for the story and the DC characters that everyone has cherished their whole lives.
Then Gunn asks the DC fans to wait for any other updates because they are giving the DC characters the attention and time that they deserve, and there are still an of things that they need to figure out. And in this post here, he uses a larger version of the classic Justice League, like even Green Arrow is in the background, like he plans on doing green arrow in the movies, basically.
So all the business suits were sort of rushed out and were like, “Whoa whoa whoa, before you make any announcements, we have something to tell you. There’s going to be a big change in the future of DC movies, and the version of the movie that you just gave us with this script isn’t going to fly”.
Why Was Wonder Woman 3 Cancelled?
The Hollywood Reporter was the site that actually broke the news about Wonder Woman 3 being canceled. They said that the project talking about Wonder Woman 3 as it stood, like whatever the treatment whatever the script Patty Jenkins gave to them did not fit with the new but still unfolding plans for the DC Universe. That’s like a nice way of saying that “The movie that you gave us isn’t going to fit with our plans, so we’re not going to make that movie.”
As part of the larger shake-up with the future of DC, a lot of people believe now that James Gunn plans on just basically getting rid of Snyder verse-related stuff, recasting a lot of actors, and maybe keeping some of the old ones. Because some of his own actors, like Harley Quinn, for instance, Amanda Waller, are Snyder verse characters.
But James Gunn was doing a soft retuning of all the characters, the backstories, the way that everybody interacts and knows each other going forward so that it feels completely different, like a completely different vibe for all the characters.
What Was Wonder Woman 3 Going Be About?
We know a little bit about what Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman 3 was going to be. She’d been talking about it recently. I think Patty Jenkins has even been talking about Wonder Woman 3 for the past couple of years because Wonder Woman 1984 had been delayed for a while. So the movie has been done for a long time. But the next movie is a really good opportunity to course correct on some of the bigger things most fans had issues with during Wonder Woman 1984.
One of the wider stylistic choices that I think a lot of people were confused by is that if you watch Wonder Woman 1984, it’s meant to be as if they made the movie during the 80s with 80s technology, but they’re using modern-day technology to pull it off.
So the very Spider-Man-looking way that she swings around seems kind of weird, or the way she runs really fast, the way they visualize that looks kind of weird. But they did that on purpose because they wanted it to look like it would have looked if they had done a Wonder Woman movie during the 80s. But I think a lot of people just felt like it came off looking a little bit weird and a little bit silly.
So I think when they get to Wonder Woman 3, stylistically, they’ll try to make it feel like a more traditional superhero movie that you would expect to see in the modern day.
But they announced that Wonder Woman 3 will be set in the present day. Probably the biggest change from the last two movies, which are period pieces. Setting it in the present-day also, as you guessed, allows them to do it as a crossover movie with other big Justice League characters, which has become the standard fare in big movie trilogies at this point.
The whole thing with a Trilogy is that you have to escalate with each movie. It has to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And sometimes, the only way to escalate things in that final movie and change the formula with the last one is to add a huge crossover character or do it as a team-up movie. The big butt now is which character she’d be crossing over with because a lot of the other Justice League characters sound like they’re not going to continue.
Will All Characters Be Recast In The New DCU?
We don’t know if Ezra Miller will be back. Maybe the studio is going to recast him no matter what happens because of his records and because The Flash movie is not doing so well at the box office.
It sounds like Ben Affleck isn’t going to continue under James Gunn. He did film a scene for the Aquaman 2 post-credit scene. Who knows if that’s going to stay in the movie or if they’ll take that out before the movie’s released? And even though there’s a solid chance that Henry Cavill could still continue as Superman, now there are a lot of questions about whether or not that’s going to come to pass because of what was announced about Wonder Woman 3 in James Gunn’s plans for sort of shepherding away the Snyder verse and starting fresh with something new.
Remember the way he treated his version of The Suicide Squad movie? It was sort of a soft retuning of the characters but sort of kept some of the things that came before. So just because you’re seeing all this news about them moving past the Snyderverse, getting rid of that stuff doesn’t mean that they’re going to get rid of every single actor that was cast within that era of DC movies.
Why Was Wonder Woman In Shazam 2?
Gal Gadot was asked a bunch of questions about crossovers during interviews last year, just in general, just in the other DC movies, “Would you be showing up at different places?”. She did have a cameo scene during Shazam Fury Of The Gods. This further complicates matters, like if they’re canceling Wonder Woman 3, then why did she appear in the Shazam movie?
Gal’s Cameo scene was meant to be more in the tone of the Shazam movies, just a little bit more jokey, more comedic. Billy Batson has fantasies about going on a date with Wonder Woman, and she appears during that fantasy sequence. In the trailer, you see a scene where he goes to therapy, and he’s talking to PJ Burns’s pediatrician about his problems, trying to be a superhero and just live that lifestyle.
At some point, he fantasizes about her, and she appears that way. Make all the jokes about Billy Batson being degenerate in real life because he’s a teenage boy. If he had a fantasy about Wonder Woman, it would probably be pretty raunchy. But because the movie’s PG-13, they’re not going to actually show you what he would be fantasizing about doing with Wonder Woman. I’ll just let you imagine that on your own.
The other obvious connection between Wonder Woman and the Shazam characters is that they share the same Pantheon of Gods. Wonder Woman is literally a demigod that’s part of the Greek god’s Pantheon. Most of the Gods with the Shazam characters get their powers from the Greek Pantheon of Gods or from the Greek mythology of gods. They got more into that during Shazam Fury of the Gods. As the title implied, they were fighting some of the Gods where their powers came from.
Patty Jenkins Busy With A Star Wars Movie?
Then there’s that whole Patty Jenkins Star Wars movie that she was working on, The Rogue Squadron movie. You may remember they announced it a couple of years ago, and they made a pretty big deal about it at this big Star Wars present.
Right after that announcement was made, the regime that was at Warner Brothers previously, who have all since either left or been fired, backed up a dump truck of money to Patty Jenkins so that she would Fast Track Wonder Woman 3 and do that instead of doing Rogue Squadron, that’s why there’s no Star Wars movie coming out in the next year or two.
That was going to be the next big movie they were going to release, and it was going to be their way of sort of sidestepping the issue of making Star Wars Episode 10. Like, “We won’t do that yet. We’ll do some other movie before we do the next big Trilogy.”
So basically, Patty Jenkins has been working on Wonder Woman 3 for the past couple of years as per the agreement she made with that previous regime. And when she shows up to the new regime, they’re like, “You know what we’re gonna pass.” As I said, though, this doesn’t mean that she won’t do Wonder Woman 3. It just means that whatever they were planning on doing for the movie has to completely change now.
This means it’s going to take a couple more years for them to fix that. There will still be Wonder Woman movies. Obviously, James Gunn plans on using the Justice League. He was literally using Justice League kingdom come in his post about the plans he was making, and that was his way of telling everyone, “Oh yeah, the Justice League Came characters are going to be a big part of my plans for the next ten years of DC movies.”
New Wonder Woman Movie?
So the strongest pitches for the story of Wonder Woman 3 right now are One: still do it as a standalone movie, not a huge crossover movie. But you give her a female villain who’s also either a God or at least as powerful as Wonder Woman. So you solve the big complaint of there not being enough action scenes in Wonder Woman 1984.
Right now, the best options for another major female villain would be people like Cersei, who’s another God, and a lot of people have been talking about her for a long time. Then you have other characters like Grail, who is basically an evil version of the Wonder Woman concept.
Number Two: you take the team-up route, and you do Wonder Woman 3 as something like Wonder Woman vs. a character like Black Adam, with some of the Shazam characters like Billy Batson getting cameos.
Because Wonder Woman shares a lot in common with the Black Adam character, she’s ancient, just like Black Adam. He’s 5,000-plus years old. So she just has some common ground that she can speak with him on. Like, “Look, I get it, I do. You want your loved ones back, but you need to move on with your life.”
But during Wonder Woman 1984, she started to replicate some of the other more complex abilities that Zeus had. Like making things invisible without having to spell cast. Like she can kind of cast spells a little bit and use magical abilities without having to speak the words of a spell. So visually, their fights would be pretty cool. But yeah, we all know this is not going to happen since we won’t see Black Adam again.
Then Number Three: But regardless of who they decide the main villain is going to be or what the story is, they should bring back Linda Carter’s Hysteria character. They hyped her up so much in that post-credit scene, she’s supposed to be their greatest Warrior, and she’s still out running around the world saving people while this is all going on.
Also Read: DC Chapter 1 Gods And Monsters Explained: All The New Announced DC Movies And TV Shows
