The Jenkins effect
With a salary boost, what’s next for the Wonder Woman director?
Wonder Woman has pulled in US$816 million at the international box office this summer. On Monday, the news broke that director Patty Jenkins was going to get paid for the sequel accordingly: She’ll reportedly make about $8 million to write, direct and produce the movie.
This is no real surprise. Joss Whedon, who directed Marvel’s The Avengers, has been frank about the fact he got a better deal to direct its sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. The shocker — and a testament to the potency of Hollywood sexism — would have been if Jenkins hadn’t been topped up for the Wonder Woman sequel.
This is delightful news for Jenkins. But there’s a difference between individual victories and systemic change in the entertainment industry. Moments such as this shouldn’t be considered the end of the struggle for pay equity, or for equity of opportunity in a business that loves to promote a few women or people of colour as long as those changes don’t imperil the established order. Instead, we should use the individual victories to create new benchmarks and ask hard questions of Hollywood.
The first benchmark that’s useful to extract from Jenkins’ Wonder Woman contract is monetary: Her deal apparently makes her the highest-paid female director and sets a new mark that other women will be able to use in comparable situations. One measure of whether Jenkins’ contract is a force for change in Hollywood is whether another female director is able to sign a similar deal or whether Jenkins will end up alone on that pinnacle.
But we should also be careful not to over-interpret this benchmark. If Kathryn Bigelow or Ava DuVernay takes the minimum weekly salary of about $18,700 (as guaranteed by the Directors Guild of America contract) to make a movie come in under budget, that doesn’t make them sellouts to feminism or mean their production companies are being unfair. Instead, the test is whether female directors in the same situation as Jenkins — directing a sequel to an extremely popular movie — get paid the same. A secondary measure is whether salaries for first-time female and non-white directors of blockbusters keep pace with those of their white male counterparts.
Another measurement to keep an eye on is whether Jenkins’ deal gives her creative freedom, keeping in mind that she’s working in a highly regimented franchise system. This isn’t about whether Jenkins gets to veer off entirely from DC’s continuity. Instead, it’s about whether she can continue to infuse the next Wonder Woman with the warmth, optimism and tenderness that characterized the first movie, while potentially dropping the more burdensome elements of DC’s style. When I heard the news about her new contract, my first hope was that she would be able to ditch DC’s penchant for third-act fight sequences that look like poorly animated video-game fights.
And finally, the real test for whether big franchise deals for innovative directors is a good thing for the industry is what they do next. Unless Jenkins decides this is what she wants to do full time, I’d consider her Wonder Woman deal a failure if it means that she spends the rest of her career directing franchise movies. Because blockbusters are the biggest movies in the world, it’s a good thing if they’re directed with some verve and wit rather than by committee.
In an ideal world, the relationship would go both ways. Franchises like Marvel, DC and Star Wars would get an infusion of energy and personality from promising directors with distinctive visions.
In turn, those directors would get publicity and the credential of having directed a huge, logistically complex movie in a challenging corporate environment that ought to make it easier for them to get original projects funded.
Otherwise, the exchange looks a little bit vampiric: Talented directors get paid large sums of money to essentially take themselves off the original movie market.
I’m excited for Jenkins to get paid because she deserves it, and because I want to see what she does with that money and reputation.
Wonder Woman was fun, but it’s not the true revolution that Hollywood needs.