The Wonder Woman director disclosed that she almost quit the project during a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast as part of the Press Rounds for Wonder Woman 1984. This ruling resulted from concerns with adequate payments. In the interview, she said she understood the influence she had for Warner Bros. given how popular Wonder Woman was. Patty Jenkins stated:
“I started to walk away. I was gonna’ walk away. I even said I’d be happy to go to another studio and make a quarter as much because it’s not a sequel, on principle, no problem. It’s interesting as someone who never made any profit in my career up until Wonder Woman, that I was always at peace with it. I was like, ‘Hey I get it.’ But now I was like, ‘Listen, I never made any money in my career because you always had the leverage and I didn’t,’ but now the shoe is on the other foot so it’s time to turn the tables.”
Following Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, and David Ayer’s The Suicide Squad, The First Wonder Woman was the fourth DCEU film. It was Gadot’s second outing as Diana Prince and tackled her roots as the Amazonian Goddess who during World War I was roped into the real world.
There is a case to be made about how the film of 2017 breathed new life into the franchise that had until that point released mainly controversial films. Granted that the DCEU still had problems with the Justice League after Wonder Woman, it persuaded people that the Warner Bros. comic book film universe had promise. Wonder Woman was the first true DCEU film that was critically and financially successful and it remains the gold standard, something that Wonder Woman 1984 may surpass.
Given all this, Jenkins was good at understanding the strength she had and using it to her benefit. Although her official salary was never released, it has been confirmed that for doing Wonder Woman 1984, she received three times what she did on Wonder Woman. She deserves it, considering what she was able to do in the first film and how the sequel is shaping up to be another crowd magnet.
Wonder Woman 1984, almost lost Patty Jenkins as its director. The filmmaker returned to the DCEU via its sequel to Helming’s 2017 hit Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, which makes sense, given how well the first film did. That said, if they were not able to work out payment problems, that wasn’t going to be the case.
Set in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Wonder Woman 1984 is going to find Diana. In Barbara Ann Minerva/Cheetah and Maxwell Lord, she is faced with two new adversaries. Despite his death in the original film, Chris Pine is also returning as Steve Trevor, something that will be a focal point in the sequel. Wonder Woman 1984 sounds worth all the wait and hassle, despite several delays and a contentious release scheme, as reviews for the film have been mostly positive. But things would have turned out differently if Jenkins had quit the blockbuster.
