Wonder Woman is a 21st-century superhero
This film will succeed where others have failed because, frankly, they were lousy movies
She’s poised to outrun the history of bad female comic-book movies
Hera be praised, Wonder Wom
an could be the long-awaited game changer for female superhero films.
Women of action have been front and center for hugely successful franchises — Alien and
The Hunger Games chief among them — but we never saw a series with Halle Berry’s Catwoman or Jennifer Garner’s Elektra. Won
der Woman (in theaters Thursday night), starring Gal Gadot as the powerful Amazon princess who finds herself on the battle lines of World War I, looks to break a streak that goes back to Super
girl’s failure to launch in 1984. Gadot had a breakout appearance as Princess Diana of Themyscira in last year’s hit Batman v
Superman: Dawn of Justice (and will reprise the character in November’s Justice League). Plus,
Wonder Woman topped a recent Fandango poll of 10,000 moviegoers as their most-anticipated summer movie; so far the reviews have been stellar (96% positive on RottenTomatoes.com); and it’s expected to have a huge debut. Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations, predicts “easily a $100 million opening weekend and then some.”
Any success would be welcome for a subgenre that hasn’t seen much. Women have been notable in recent super-ensembles “but carrying an entire film to box-office success has remained an elusive achievement. Until now,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore.
The track record has been less than ideal. Supergirl (with Helen Slater wearing the iconic “S”) bombed with $14 million 33 years ago, Catwoman could only scratch up $40 million in 2004, and Elek
tra tanked even worse a year later with $24 million. But they were also pretty terrible movies.
Meanwhile, action movies featuring warrior women, like Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in Mad
Max: Fury Road and Daisy Ridley’s Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, have done gangbusters in recent years.
“It’s been proven so many times that female-led movies can make money,” says Fandango .com correspondent Alicia Malone. “But Hollywood still seems to have a little bit of amnesia and they always see these as the exceptions to the rule rather than the rule. The comic-book superhero genre has been so maledominated for such a long time and it was seen as a big risk to take it in a different direction” with a woman at the forefront.
But Wonder Woman isn’t just some supporting player: She’s an A-list superhero who has been around for 76 years, has a cult 1970s TV show to her name and is better known than almost everybody on the DC and Marvel rosters, Bock says. What makes Wonder Woman special for director Patty Jenkins is how distinctive she is from previous superheroes, female or male. “She stands for love and for truth,” the filmmaker says. “She can do incredibly strong things but she doesn’t want to. She’s trying to avoid (war) and she believes in a better mankind.” With female directors accounting for only 7% of the 250 highest-grossing films last year (according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State University), “it’s such a great chance for Patty Jenkins to show that women are just as capable of directing these movies as men,” Malone says. Jenkins acknowledges feeling “a tremendous amount of pressure and responsibility. It was always like, ‘OK, this is the first Wonder Woman movie. It’s got to be great and she deserves a great movie.’ ” But her grand aspirations match those of an audience that has been waiting for years to see Diana take on the big screen. “I can’t wait to see young girls dressed up as Wonder Woman — that makes my heart sing,” Malone says. “And I think young boys and men as well are going to really look to Wonder Woman as a great example of a female superhero.”