Wonder Woman: Is this a New Era?

So over this past weekend I took my wife to see “Wonder Woman”.  In theatres!  I know that shouldn’t sound as exciting as it does, but when you have a fixed income and 4 lovely children, you tend to Netflix or Red Box a lot of your movie viewing.  Which, if you noticed, is why a LOT of my movie reviews happen after the films have left theatres and sat on the shelf for a bit; well there’s that and the fact that it gives me a little more freedom to talk about endings.

So what about “Wonder Woman”?  First let me take you back in time to 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”.  Without diving too much into that film we can all agree that movie had its flaws.  One thing that was almost unanimously agreed upon as done very well was the introduction of Wonder Woman.  Her role was small but pivotal and her action sequences got audiences almost out of their seats.  With that in mind, that powerful response fueling the development of the character, it would seem that a solo adventure for the Amazon princess would be a no-brainer for Warner Brothers.

But Diana Prince’s journey to the big screen is nothing if not a difficult one.  For the longest time “authorities” on box office touted that a movie based on a female superhero lead would not make money.  The problem was that, they weren’t exactly wrong.

Here is a brief chart of the most notable superhero films with female leads since 1984.  Why did I start at 1984, you ask; because that’s the first instance of a major studio producing a female superhero movie  It all starts with Supergirl  The graph below shows in blue the budget for the films, in millions of dollars, and the red shows the box off returns of those films, again in millions of dollars.  The odds were not in Wonder Woman’s favor.

Now with all this against her, how did we get Wonder Woman onto the big screen?  To answer that we need to first look at another major comic book movie studio: Marvel.  With the advent of the Avengers, and Black Widow’s major role in the film, fans started clamoring for her to get her own solo adventure, much like literally everyone else on the Avengers.  Notice that I only selected 6 movies for my graph?  That’s because those movies are pulled from the pages of established comic book studios, which have a fan base the film studios could appeal to and work up from.  And most of them tanked.  The only one to pull up any money was Elektra and it was savaged by the critics, which torpedoed it from ever getting a sequel.  So where were the fans?  Studios believed that, based on these numbers fans were not going to come out to see these movies.  So what changed?

Again, it all starts with Supergirl.  In 2015 CBS and Warner Brothers brought the girl of steel to life on the small screen.  This was a testing ground for how popular a production centered on a female superhero could be, and it worked.  Through careful crafting of a quality product, Supergirl soared through the ratings.  For its second season it moved to the CW where it joined their television superhero universe and branched out into stronger, darker stories.  Suddenly studios had numbers in droves about how fans wanted to see superhero productions featuring strong female leads.  That combined with the strong positive response Wonder Woman got from “Batman v Superman” and suddenly the studios had something they could bank on.  Now it’s fair to say that the seeds of Wonder Woman were planted all the way back in “Batman v Superman” which is great but you know that they needed those Supergirl numbers to pull the trigger on it.

In the summer of 2017 Wonder Woman rocketed onto the big screen and, as you can see the fans responded.  With a budget of $149 million Wonder Woman dominated the summer block buster scene, raking in $435.2 MILLION after being in theatres for only two weeks.  $103 million of that came on its opening weekend alone.  The second weekend (when I got to see it) it dominated the box office easily brushing aside Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy” for top spot.  To put that in perspective, not only did a superhero movie featuring a female lead earn the triple digits for millions on its opening weekend, it took out Tom “Summer Block Buster” Cruise on its second weekend in theatres. 

But I know what you’re thinking; “Michael, talk about the damn movie already!”  Okay, no.

Gal Gadot was amazing in the film.  She was powerful, she was vulnerable, she was funny, and she was deadly as hell.  She was Wonder Woman.  Chris Pine as Steven Trevor was great.  His timing was on point, and his chemistry with Gadot was excellent.  The supporting cast was terrific, and I would love an opportunity to see them together again.  Saïd Taghmaoui to me was a particularly excellent addition.

There is an implied sex scene in the film, and the final fight left a lot of questions for how the action went down in “Batman v Superman”, but the final product was fantastic.  Not only did it give us a broader picture of this amazing character, it also helped fill in some blanks for why she does certain things in Dawn of Justice.  Like “Why was she so willing to work with Bruce Wayne at the end?” and “When she looks at Lois mourning Superman’s death, why does she look to the sky?”

I am actively not telling you about the plot because I think you should go see this for yourself.  It is worth it.

 

Thanks for reading.