There has been a TON of comics book movie news coming out lately. Comic book movies are big money, and that money has been getting bigger and bigger since X-Men and Spider-Man hit the big screen over 11 years ago.
Marvel Comics is currently in production of their Guardians of the Galaxy movie (a comic that I have zero knowledge of, but am excited for nonetheless).
In that comic there is a character called Rocket Raccoon, who is an “intelligent, anthropomorphic raccoon, who is an expert marksman and master tactician.”
Yeah.
No, seriously.
This one second clip in a leaked trailer of the movie inspired this tweet:
DC/WB is all like "Wonder Woman's too confusing for a movie!" and Marvel/Disney is all like "Here's a raccoon with a machine gun"
— Brett White (@brettwhite) August 12, 2013
I’ve seen a lot of these types of post on the Internet for a while, and I understand the outrage and frustration of Wonder Woman fans who want to see their favorite character on the big screen.
People are also apparently saying some moronic things about a possible Wonder Woman movie. I haven’t seen these these things myself, but I don’t doubt that there are people out there who say or think these things, but if comments on a website kept things from being made from being made nothing would ever get done.
First, here’s my deal. I don’t have a lot of exposure to Wonder Woman. Most of my knowledge of her comes from team books (JLA/JL), crossovers, or event story lines.
In 2006 when Wonder Woman volume 3 started, I picked the book up and stuck with it for 25 issues. Looking back, I’m surprised I stuck with it that long. The only thing I remember about it was how bored I was while reading it. So in 2008, I dropped Wonder Woman from my pull list.
Why was I bored reading Wonder Woman? It’s the same reason I find the Flash books that I’ve read boring. I find Wonder Woman’s rouges gallery incredibly boring and forgettable. I’m by no means an expert on Wonder Woman, but I can only name two villains of Wonder Woman off the top of my head, Circe and Cheetah.
When DC launched the New 52 in 2011 I seriously considered putting Wonder Woman back on my pull list again, but in an effort to keep my monthly cost down I decided against it, remembering how little I enjoyed it previously.
About 6 or 7 months into the New 52 I read person after person on Reddit talk about how it was one of their favorite New 52 books, so I picked up the trade of the first six issues (volume 2 and volume 3 are now available, too).
I was surprised how right they were. The book was awesome. Brian Azzarello relaunched the character in an awesome universe.
Wonder Woman is the daughter of Zeus, and in this series she is fighting along side and against her many brothers and sisters to protect a newborn baby, all of them children of Zeus. Really epic storytelling, and the art is amazing. Wonder Woman is one of my favorite books to read each month, and if you told me that in 2008 I would have laughed at you.
That said, I don’t think this version of Wonder Woman would work on the big screen, but only because it wouldn’t fit into the larger universe that DC is trying to build and lead into a Justice League movie. (It would, however, make an awesome animated movie.)
So what’s the problem, really?
The biggest problem in this equation is DC Comics and Warner Brothers, not Wonder Woman.
Is Wonder Woman a difficult character to bring to the big screen? No she really shouldn’t be. Any character who has 71 years of material to pull from should not be difficult to make a movie about. Also, in a world where woman’s rights are still under attack both domestically and abroad there is plenty a Wonder Woman movie could do.
DC and Warner Brothers have a very spotty record when it comes to making movies of their comic book characters. Outside of the Dark Knight trilogy (which, granted, has its flaws) Marvel has consistently drank DC’s milkshake, and will probably continue to do so for a number of years to come.
Marvel struck gold with Iron Man in 2008, and they have continued to pump out good movies leading up to The Avengers, directed by some guy who was working on a Wonder Woman movie until he wasn’t.
What was his idea for a Wonder Woman movie?
She was a little bit like Angelina Jolie [laughs]. She sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people, and the fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane. And ultimately her romance with Steve was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.
I don’t know, but that sounds like a pretty good premise to me.
In a world where Marvel is a year away from releasing a movie with a gun-totting space raccoon, and is in pre-production on an Ant-Man movie, the fact that we don’t have a Wonder Woman movie yet is ridiculous.
Is there a problem with bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen or is DC and Warner Brothers filled with incompetent idiots? (Hint: Have you seen Man of Steel? They’re idiots.) Warner Brothers and DC are filled with incompetent idiots. At this point maybe we should be glad that DC hasn’t Man of Steel’d or Green Lantern’d Wonder Woman yet.
But, while DC is a mess and Wonder Woman is trapped in the middle, Marvel hasn’t given us a comic book movie with a female lead yet, either.