Jenkins refused to give in to the studio’s desire to cut the mall’s action scene or the sequel to the Amazon Olympics.
Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection
Although “Wonder Woman 1984” did not receive the level of critical acclaim that greeted its 2017 predecessor, most critics agreed that the Patty Jenkins sequel started off strong with consecutive action-oriented scenes: Themyscira’s flashback depicting the Amazon Olympics and the frustrated robbery of the mall in Washington DC in 1984. Jenkins was a fan of this double-opening story structure, but she told JoBlo in a recent interview that Warner Bros. did not support the decision and wanted one of the sequences to be cut to keep the total run time of the film low.
“It wasn’t always written,” said Jenkins of Themyscira’s flashback. “It was the success of the first film, but it was also something else. I wouldn’t have put it there because of the success of the film, because it actually made it too long. We have two premieres in our film and we talked about it with the studio all the time and they said, ‘You have to cut the mall and the 80s, or you have to cut the Amazon.’ I was like, we can’t, we can’t cut too. “
“The reason I ended up realizing that you need the Amazon is because … you do that thing where you’re like, wait, you have to remember all the people who didn’t see the first ‘Wonder Woman’ who watched this on a plane, ”Jenkins continued on how to protect the double-opening structure. “And suddenly it’s like, oh, it’s super hard to understand who Diana is and what’s going on without touching the basis of it.”
Jenkins added: “I love that you hear all about ‘being a great hero takes your entire life’, you know? So, there was this wisdom there that they were trying to tell her that it’s not about being the strongest or the fastest, it’s about these complex observations that you have to make in life to become a true hero. I love that she doesn’t understand this until the final speech.
“Wonder Woman 1984” is now playing in theaters and broadcast on HBO Max. Jenkins and star Gal Gadot are already developing a third film “Wonder Woman”. The comic book’s HBO Max streaming window ends on January 24.
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