Is WB simply afraid of Wonder Woman?

[Kelthaz]

I know of Asterix because of the Sega games, but if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have a clue. However, I am fairly familiar with Tin Tin.

[Mister Fandango]

I love the rationalization a lot of people use around here. "Well, since that last Wonder Woman show NBC made was utter crap, any attempt to do anything with Wonder Woman WILL be utter crap. Because it was Wonder Woman that made it crap, not all the stupid ass decisions the people who made the previous show." Just blows my mind how some people think.

[Kegg]

...has anyone actually said that?

[Gaith]

Kelthaz wrote:

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I know of Asterix because of the Sega games, but if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have a clue. However, I am fairly familiar with Tin Tin.

... But not familiar enough to know that he's "Tintin", apparently.

(Sorry, but I grew up loving Tintin, so seeing his name split up is a pet peeve of mine.)

Kegg wrote:

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...has anyone actually said that?

No. The actual conversation goes like this:

A: There ought to be a Wonder Woman movie!
B: Sure, but there are legitimate reasons for a studio to be wary of such a project.
A: No, there aren't! Wonder Woman is popular!
B: Sort of, but there have been a lot of failures of similarly-themed projects, including an aborted WW tv show. This history of failure only makes studios more nervous, adding to their existing nervousness, which was understandable to begin with.
Mister Fandango: I love the rationalization a lot of people use around here. "Well, since that last Wonder Woman show NBC made was utter crap, any attempt to do anything with Wonder Woman WILL be utter crap. Because it was Wonder Woman that made it crap, not all the stupid ass decisions the people who made the previous show." Just blows my mind how some people think.

I'd like to see a well-done Wonder Woman movie myself. But I can also see why WB is wary of making one, and why they're going to introduce her in a JLA movie, which does actually seem to be happening this time, rather than a solo flick.

[Greg Cox]

Gaith wrote:

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... But not familiar enough to know that he's "Tintin", apparently.

(Sorry, but I grew up loving Tintin, so seeing his name split up is a pet peeve of mine.).

Tell me about it. I react the same way when I see "Ghostrider" or "Ironman."

I wonder: Do people ever confuse "Tintin" and "Rin Tin Tin"?

Don't laugh. I've met people who thought that the Flash and Flash Gordon were the same character . . . .

[Gaith]

I'm sure that there's at least a subconscious element of confusion from Rin Tin Tin, yes.

[CaptainCanada]

Despite frequent financial failures, the studios have greenlit various female-led action movies, so I don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle, though it's definitely a factor.

I think the single-biggest issue is that there's never been a really coherent conception of who Diana is, creatively, that has been consistently held by writers and audiences. In her original form she was probably the closest thing the Golden Age superheroes had to a creator-owned sort of character -- so much about her is derived from the very unique philosophies and proclivities of William Marston, things that none of the many people who've written since have had much sense of what to do with.

There have been great runs on Wonder Woman since then (George Perez, Greg Rucka), but those runs tend to, like Marston, be highly specific to their creators, and they were never widely adopted by other writers as a mold to follow (indeed, both Perez and Rucka were succeeded by people who basically junked everything they'd done; or, in Rucka's case, editorial dictates caused Rucka to junk it himself to clean the slate for the next guy). There have been attempts to synthesize the best elements of previous runs (Phil Jiminez, Gail Simone), but those didn't really take either.

The Lynda Carter show from the 70s is her only real popcultural solo product outside of the comics, but it's rather akin to the Adam West Batman show in that it offers modern filmmakers no template to work with. It's an icon of camp.

My take is that WW frustrates executives' market calculations because there's no clear sense in their minds of what version of the character the public really wants to see. Hence the constant rejections of attempts at scripting.

[Harvey]

I don't see how Warner Bros. has been afraid of the Wonder Women property here. If they truly were, they'd stop spending so much money on it. (Though, in recent memory, the only attempt that has gone into production was the failed pilot, the cost of countless screenplays can't have been cheap).

Their behavior doesn't really seem all that different than the way they treated Batman after the failure of Batman & Robin in 1997 (with several aborted attempts before Nolan's reboot in 2005), or Superman between the last Christopher Reeve movie and Bryan Singer's version in 2006.

[DWF]

Mister Fandango wrote:

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I love the rationalization a lot of people use around here. "Well, since that last Wonder Woman show NBC made was utter crap, any attempt to do anything with Wonder Woman WILL be utter crap. Because it was Wonder Woman that made it crap, not all the stupid ass decisions the people who made the previous show." Just blows my mind how some people think.

For the record there was no show just a pilot which NBC didn't actually buy.

[Gotham Central]

Harvey wrote:

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I don't see how Warner Bros. has been afraid of the Wonder Women property here. If they truly were, they'd stop spending so much money on it. (Though, in recent memory, the only attempt that has gone into production was the failed pilot, the cost of countless screenplays can't have been cheap).

Their behavior doesn't really seem all that different than the way they treated Batman after the failure of Batman & Robin in 1997 (with several aborted attempts before Nolan's reboot in 2005), or Superman between the last Christopher Reeve movie and Bryan Singer's version in 2006.

WB is being super cautious with all of its properties. After Superman Returns was a letdown and the debacle of Green Lantern, they are being even more cautious. Both Wonder Woman and The Flash have been in development hell of a while.

[Mister Fandango]

Kegg wrote:

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...has anyone actually said that?

In response to Arrow being an inexpensive show about a superhero...

Gaith wrote:

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NBC tried that. Didn't work out so good.

That's a direct implication that because an inexpensive version didn't work, it CAN'T work, because it was a crap show about Wonder Woman, not that it was just a crap show, period.

So yes, people have said that. No matter how much they try to backpeddle now.

[Guy Gardener]

I was watching the pilot for a second time and i blinked. Scrubbed my eyes and said "fuck me, but that's Cary Elwes."

I'm imagining that during preprodution that the director said, and I'm suddenly remembering that the director isn't an idiot, but he might have been drunk, but the director said "Cary, I know that you got old and fat, and that's a good start, but you're still too sexy for American TV, is there anything you can do about your English accent?"

(I love it when Carey shows up on Psych.)

[sidious618]

I think a large problem with Wonder Woman, outside of the women action film situation, is that she doesn't have consistent characterization like Batman or Superman. As a character, there have been few truly interesting takes on her and how she behaves tend to vary a bit depending on the writer in a way that Batman and Superman don't.

[TREK_GOD_1]

Kegg wrote:

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Like Iron Dude and Space Ring Guy?

Because I'd never heard of those characters before they got movies, and I'm pretty sure Iron Man's success owed a lot to having Robert Downey Jr. in the lead visibly having a good time, being sold as a fun blockbuster with a bankable cast and so on (and I still think this reflects my befuddlement over the existence of a Green Lantern movie better than anything I could actually say).

You may not have known who Green Lantern and Iron Man are, but they had a long position in the popular culture in comics, animation and generations of merchandising--the latter being the pop cultural glue connecting them to memory even at a time when no films or TV series are in production.

Now, if you were talking about a Blue Beetle movie, then....

Conversely, I did know who Wonder Woman is, if only by cultural osmosis.

The logic has nothing to do with brand recognition and everything to do with the belief that people won't go see action movies starring women.

I find this partially false: the original Alien movie series was headlined by a woman who managed to overcome the odds when her male counterparts ended up as hosts for Facehuggers. Even Alien vs. Predator had a female protagonist/survivor in a story where male energy would have been expected.

Then there's the Resident Evil film series which overdoses on action--but the star is female, and the most memorable supporting characters are as well.

Inarguably, WW is more culturally relevant/known than the characters of Alien or RE, enjoyed a popular live action TV series, and has been a part of every animated DC group TV series produced since the original Super Friends from 1973.

That said, I cannot believe WW not being supported as a film has anything to do with an avoidance of promiting a female action hero.

[Gaith]

TREK_GOD_1 wrote:

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the original Alien movie series was headlined by a woman who managed to overcome the odds when her male counterparts ended up as hosts for Facehuggers.

Alien is a horror movie (in which Final Girls are fairly common), a haunted ship in space, not an action movie, and Ripley is certainly no superhuman.

Even in Aliens, which is an action movie, she's still more of a Final Girl than a badass, eventually taking the action lead only because the real tough ones, the Marines, are wounded or killed.

Same goes for Sarah Connor, really: Final Girl in T1, not nearly as tough or strong as Uncle Bob in T2.

So, unless we're talking about a non-superpowered WW, I don't find Ripley or Sarah Connor to be useful points of reference. Alice and Selene, yes. But I've already addressed them.