Pitching a Wonder Woman movie

Why can't we have one? [Link]

My ideal plot — and I’ve thought a lot about this dream project Wonder Woman run I’ve wanted to do over the past decade — is that you start by taking Paradise Island away from Earth. It shouldn’t be a place you can just go to, there’s no crashed planes landing there in World War II and introducing all the Amazons to “Man’s World.” It’s a myth. It’s something like Mount Olympus — or, to stick with the cinematic comparisons, something like Asgard. This forgotten place full of immortal warriors, far from the concerns of what we’re doing down here on Earth. But, like Asgard, it’s a place where they’re aware of Earth, where they can look down and shake their heads and this world we’ve got here and how bad we’re screwing up.

But one of them doesn’t think about how much we’re screwing up. She looks at Earth, and she sees something she can help. She sees people who need a champion, people who need someone to show them how to rise up, people who need to be defended and inspired and rescued, someone who has trained all her life to fight, but who has nothing to do with those skills because there’s no war in Paradise. She wants to make a difference, and she knows where she has to go to do it.

No prizes for guessing who she is.

I’ll admit that it’s a pretty basic setup (1 part Thor, one part Little Mermaid, mix and season with sets from Xena: Warrior Princess to taste), but I think it works, and you can go in a few different ways with it. The traditional origin story has the tournament, but my preference has always been to see Diana earning her abilities in a series of those classic Greek Mythological labors, like Hercules, Theseus or the Argonauts. A big journey to get what she needs before she finally goes to Earth.

But more importantly than that, it sets her origin apart from the other two heroes that she’s always going to be stood beside: It gives her a choice. Superman chooses to use his powers to help people, and that’s great, but when you get right down to it, he can’t stay on Krypton. That life is gone, and so he’s sent to Earth. Batman can’t un-shoot his parents, his life is changed by something beyond his control. They’re both heroes that are reactive at heart, they have situations forced upon them. For Wonder Woman, the one thing I’ve always loved about her character is that she doesn’t have to be a superhero. She could just stay right there on her magical island. But she knows there are people who would be better off if she was out there, so she goes. She makes the choice to be a hero. For me, that’s what sets her apart, what makes her so inspiring, that she has no personal stake in what’s going on, but she still chooses to do the right thing. If you start at a core of that kind of altruism and determination, then everything else, the moral strength, the intelligence, the kindness, it all falls into place.

Getting back to comparing it to movies, I think there’s a lot there that’s appealing in the same way as the character work in Captain America — you just get a lot more out of the wartime roots with Cap than you do with Wonder Woman, where they’re this weird vestigial toe.

So the first movie would be all about Wonder Woman’s journey to Earth, an adventure that she has where she leaves Paradise Island behind, in a way that she can never really get back to it, but she knows we need her more. So there’s this grand, mythological adventure, a villain (Ares) barring her progress, but it ends with her arrival on Earth. And yeah, I said first movie, because the third thing I’d do is commit to that jazz. Superman has had one good movie out of six, Batman’s fared slightly better with two and a half out of seven, and they still keep cranking those things out no matter how badly I want them to stop. There’s no reason to go into Wonder Woman not thinking of it as a franchise. Make the effort. Have the cameras rolling on the second one before the first one opens. Put everything you can into making her the star that you say you want her to be.

See, that’s the thing: You talk about people saying it’s hard to do a Wonder Woman movie. It ain’t that hard, folks, and I know that because they have already mapped out how you do it. The character work of Captain America, the sweeping mythology of Thor, the all-ages appeal of The Incredibles, the engaging personalities of stuff like Tangled. It’s all out there already, and you’re starting with a character who’s already on t-shirts, who people already know and want to like. If that’s hard, then how the hell did we get a movie about Green Lantern?