Director Patty Jenkins is currently enjoying the mountains of praise that are coming in for Wonder Woman, the latest and most well-received movie in the DC Extended Universe to date. Before she landed the job of helming the first solo adventure for the amazing Amazonian, though, she almost made a film for the Marvel Cinematic Universe instead. Namely, Thor: The Dark World, which was eventually handled by Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jenkins opened up about her reasons for exiting the God of Thunder’s sequel. Though she was reluctant to go into too much detail, she did have this to say about the film:
“There have been things that have crossed my path that seemed like troubled projects. And I thought, ‘If I take this, it’ll be a big disservice to women. If I take this knowing it’s going to be trouble and then it looks like it was me, that’s going to be a problem. If they do it with a man, it will just be yet another mistake that the studio made. But with me, it’s going to look like I dropped the ball, and it’s going to send a very bad message.’ So I’ve been very careful about what I take for that reason.”
It looks like Jenkins made the right call with this one. In the past, the general naffness of Elektra and Catwoman – the only two female-led superhero movies before Wonder Woman – was blamed on the gender of the central characters by Hollywood execs. Likewise, it’s all too easy to imagine that Thor: The Dark World‘s lacklustre critical reception would have been blamed on its female director.
Instead, Jenkins waited to find the perfect comic book movie for her and has definitely found it with Wonder Woman. The flick is currently sitting as the highest-rated superhero movie on Rotten Tomatoes and should go on to usher in a new age of female-led superhero films.
Wonder Woman is released in many countries from today, June 1st, and will arrive in the US on June 2nd.
