When James Gunn and Peter Safran were named in 2022 as co-presidents of DC Studios by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, early indications from the pair were that at least some of the characters and actors from the previous DC film incarnation, aka the DC Extended Universe, might survive the reboot to fight another day. And of all the characters from the prior sequence of films, it was widely believed that Wonder Woman, a beloved fan favorite played by Gal Gadot, was perhaps the only major member of the Justice League that could make the cut.
It was not, however, meant to be. Although developmental work on Wonder Woman 3 had started under the previous regime, it was reported in December 2022 that a third film starring Gadot would not move forward. This was after Patty Jenkins, director of both Wonder Woman (2017) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), had submitted her treatment for the project, which was said to “not fit in” with the plans for a new DC universe that Gunn and Safran unveiled a short time later—plans that included a prequel TV series about the Amazons set on Themyscira called Paradise Lost.
At the same time, Gadot’s Diana and some of her supporting Amazon characters, like Queen Hippolyta, remained popular among fans. To Connie Nielsen, who played Hippolyta in both films as well as in Justice League, the outright abandonment of one of the few acknowledged bright spots of the troubled “Snyderverse” era has been as frustrating as it is baffling.
“I think it’s crazy. I mean, frankly, I don’t understand it,” Nielsen tells us while sitting down to discuss another of her beloved roles, the Roman noble Lucilla who will be returning in Gladiator II next month. “[Wonder Woman] made $800 million just in the movie theaters, and it has an enormous and passionate, passionate fan base. These are spectacular films, and there’s just no reason I can understand whatsoever for not investing in that. If I were a business person, I would say that’s money on the table. It’s right there. Plus every time we’ve done it, [it was] with budgets that were way smaller than any of the other DC budgets.”
Wonder Woman was a groundbreaking film in many ways: it was the first major superhero movie with a woman in the lead role, and it introduced an entire civilization of powerful, advanced women warriors in the Amazons and their hidden kingdom on Themyscira—what Nielsen describes as an “insane, cool, gorgeous universe” that she loved being a part of.
“I loved that island, those costumes, those characters, the values that those Amazons represented,” she says now. “It was fantastic. I built that character off real historical and anthropology books on the Amazons, there’s now real DNA evidence that these Amazons really did exist, that there really were famous female warriors, and we now know that burial mounds were where those warriors were buried. They just assumed it was a man because of who the person was buried with. And now they realize, oh, no, DNA analysis shows they were women.”
There is in fact increasing evidence that the Amazonian warriors of ancient Greek legend, which partially inspired the original Wonder Woman comics, may have been based on real nomadic tribes of fighting women who wandered Russia, central Asia, and Eastern Europe some 2,500 years ago. With that in mind, Nielsen rues the fact that the captivating fictional world that Jenkins, Gadot, she, and others brought to vivid life—while giving the superhero genre a long-overdue gender shake-up—is not likely to reemerge on the big screen anytime soon.
“It’s a pity,” Nielsen laments. “I really hope that they change their minds, and that they realize this is crazy. This is a billion dollars that is lying on the table. Not claiming those fans and making them happy is something I just don’t really understand at all.”
Look for more of our conversation with Connie Nielsen, as well as Ridley Scott and Fred Hechinger about Gladiator II in the next issue of Den of Geek Magazine, which releases next week. Gladiator II, meanwhile, opens on Nov. 22.
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