It’s a testament to the popularity of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman that not even the unbelievably awful Wonder Woman 1984 derailed her take on the character. Warner Bros. is fast-tracking Wonder Woman 3, she’ll be referenced in The Flash, and the character recently made an unexpected appearance in Peacemaker (albeit in shadows and played by another actor).
Now, Gadot has shared a behind-the-scenes image from the original Wonder Woman from a much-criticized sequence late in the movie. Check it out:
The shot comes from Wonder Woman’s final confrontation with Ares, a fight that many consider the low point of the movie as it descends into iffy CGI and a giant monster battle. This wasn’t originally the plot, with director Patty Jenkins having to bend to the will of Warner Bros. producers demanding that the film end with a big fight.
In an appearance on Marc Maron’s ‘WTF!’ podcast, Jenkins said:
“That was the only thing that the studio forced my hand on, that it was not supposed to be. He never turns into Ares. The whole point of the movie was that you get there to the big monster and he’s just standing there looking at you and says, ‘I didn’t do anything’. And then the studio kept saying, ‘Okay, we’ll let you do that and then we’ll see’. And then I could feel it creeping up, and at the last minute they were like, ‘You know what, we want Ares to show up’. And I was like, ‘Goddammit, we don’t have time to do that now’. ‘Nope, you gotta do it’. And so it p*sses me off now, because sometimes I’ll read the reviews and the only thing that unanimously gets some sh*t about was those end pyrotechnics. That, like, ‘DC always does this’. And the truth was it was them, the studio did make me do that, and it wasn’t right. But that’s okay.”
Jenkins and Gadot will next team up on Cleopatra, a new movie about the iconic Egyptian Pharoah. Jenkins was lined up to direct the movie, though has now vacated the director’s chair to produce it and focus on her Star Wars Rogue Squadron movie and Wonder Woman 3.
Unlike Diana’s previous two movies, Wonder Woman 3 will be set in the DCEU’s present, though as yet that’s all we know about it. Jenkins has already completed a script, though apparently, that story is under revision in order to reflect the world after the COVID-19 pandemic, with shooting likely to begin sometime in 2023.
There is also a Wonder Woman spinoff in the works about the Amazons of Themyscira, though details on that are even hazier.
More on these as we hear them.