Wonder Woman 3’s cancellation shouldn’t shock anyone

DC Comics/Warner Bros won’t be moving forward with Patty Jenkins’ version of Wonder Woman 3. 

If you’ve been paying attention to DC Comics movies and TV shows, you’ve noticed a trend: Warner Bros/Discovery has been making some cuts. Batgirl, The Wonder Twins, and Batman: Caped Crusader are only three of the many projects that were canceled.

With fans enjoying recent DC films Shazam, Aquaman, Black Adam, and The Suicide Squad, and HBO Max series Peacemaker, it looked like the DCEU was back on track. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. And it might not be the last of the cancellations either.

Recently, it was announced that Wonder Woman 3 would not get made – or at least Patty Jenkins’ version of it. According to The Wrap, Jenkins walked off the project. The site also reported that the director let Warner Bros. co-CEOs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, “know that they were wrong, that they didn’t understand her, didn’t understand the character, didn’t understand character arcs and didn’t understand what Jenkins was trying to do.”

Whether or not this is true is unfortunate. However, Wonder Woman 3 hitting a wall shouldn’t shock anyone.

It sounds like Wonder Woman 3 was always going to struggle to get made. Let this writer say that Patty Jenkins could be 100% right. When the studio don’t see your vision, things get changed and it often results in situations like this. It’s the “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario. Unfortunately, it could be why the final act in Wonder Woman and most of WW1984 wasn’t what it could have been.

Second, when Warner Bros started canceling all sorts of things, it was clear that Wonder Woman 3 was going to be next. The DCEU has been a mess recently and WW1984 didn’t recoup. It had a $200 million budget and only brought in $169 million. Granted, a lot of that is due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the movie streaming on HBO Max (on which it reportedly performed incredibly well), but the movie just wasn’t well-received, especially when compared to its critically-acclaimed predecessor.

It’s a shame. The franchise had a lot of potential if they let Patty Jenkins do the project she wanted.

As for whether Gal Gadot returns to the role of Wonder Woman, that is unclear, but it seems that Warner Bros. wants her to. Throughout the DCEU, she’s done whatever she was charged with and did it well. She had all of the characteristics you’d want from Diana Prince: Tough, elegant, regal, and believable when she was fighting. There’s no reason for her to be punished for the mistakes of DC and Warner Bros.

However, in situations like this, everyone tends to go down with the ship, and since Gadot and Jenkins have been a dynamic duo that loved collaborating on both movies, she may not want to return to do a third one without her.

We don’t know if we have seen the last of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. It’s disappointing since she never reached her potential. It appears to be a trend with DC and Warner Bros. Hopefully there’s some resolution between DC Studios and Patty Jenkins. The fans deserve to see the trilogy end properly.

What do you think, readers? Is Wonder Woman 3‘s cancellation shocking? Did it deserve a third movie? Let us know in the comments below.