The start of the pandemic in 2020 sent ripples throughout the world, upending our way of life in ways we’re still feeling. Everything was affected by it, including the entertainment industry, with many Hollywood studios delaying the making and releasing of films. Eventually, though, some bit the bullet and chose to release something, even if it was just on streaming, and that’s how we wound up with Warner Bros. releasing Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas Day 2020 both in theaters and on HBO Max.
Watching a movie in theaters is an entirely different experience compared to just watching it at home, especially superhero movies. Without access to a big screen, I wound up watching the film on my phone back when it came out and then on my TV more recently. I will never know how I and most of us would’ve taken to this movie if it’d come out in a regular world, but in the one we are in now, it’s still surprising how not good it is.
Nothing about it has really gotten better with time, and if anything, elements like the parallels to Donald Trump and everything surrounding Steve Trevor have gotten worse. It’s open-hearted, sure, and goofy, yes, but it all makes for something that feels like work to watch even when you’re not actually watching it for work.
Another thing about it that’s aged badly? The concept of Wonder Woman as a multimedia franchise, of which 1984 will effectively remain the final word for the foreseeable future. Despite garnering a lot of views at the time, reactions weren’t feeling the sequel, and after popping in for short cameos in The Flash and Shazam 2 to remind you she was still around, Diana was put back on the shelf.
Her third solo movie was scrapped after James Gunn started fresh with a new DC movie universe—one that’s waiting a while to find someone new to take up the tiara and lasso. (For what it’s worth, Gal Gadot sure tried to fight the tide and stick around in this new continuity, but like Black Adam and Superman before her, that didn’t pan out at all.) And then earlier this year, we learned the Wonder Woman game announced back in 2021 had been cancelled; its creator, Monolith Productions, was also shut down, which was reportedly a whole saga unto itself.
So yeah, not an especially great time to be a Wonder Woman fan, which feels surprising to say given how much goodwill the first movie had earned back in 2017. WB spent years seemingly going out of its way not giving her a movie or even so much as giving her another TV show that the idea of her being in a film alongside Batman and Superman and getting a solo movie of her own the following year felt impossible. That her origin movie was good and had the box office to show for it feels like a lifetime ago. Her appearances, starting in Justice League’s 2017 version up to her last two cameos, didn’t really let her do much beyond letting the audience know she looked good in fights and had one of the most divisive musical themes in superhero history.
She’s not the first hero to fall into a creative rut; if anything, Wonder Woman’s just one of many, like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and so on, who’ve found themselves hit with various roadblocks across the different mediums their owners would very much like them to thrive in. It’s unfortunate that bad luck is one of the most powerful constants in the universe, but there you go: no one can blame the X-Men for currently being in a holding pattern until their MCU debut, just as it’s not Diana’s fault that Warner Bros. keeps threatening to fall apart across its various divisions every two weeks.
She is, as all of them are, just a casualty of what it means to be a well-known IP in this day and age: sometimes, your owners don’t entirely know what to do with you and make it everyone’s problem while they try to figure out what your next few years look like from medium to medium.
It’s the “figuring out” part that’ll be interesting to see; both this year’s Superman and 2022’s The Batman looked to focus on key aspects of their respective heroes that weren’t as highlighted in their previous cinematic incarnations. The question then becomes if Wonder Woman will follow suit and what that means when her back catalog is much slimmer in comparison, something which likely played a factor in her first adjacent project in this new DC universe, a TV prequel focused on the Amazons rather than herself.
Maybe through that, WB hopes to find what Wonder Woman means and stands for in a way distinct from Gadot’s tenure while similarly informed by its highs and lows. Whenever that new Diana enters the picture, she’ll have some shoes to fill… maybe not big ones, but shoes to fill all the same. And hopefully by then, Gunn and whoever’s tasked with this new incarnation will have more than a movie’s worth of a vision for what to do with her.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
