Thoughts on the Wonder Woman Movie Actually Happening

As is well known by now to anyone who pays much attention to films of the type, Warner Bros. got the Wonder Woman film made, and got it out this summer, and it has already pulled in enough money to be safely confirmed as a commercial success. (Its $460 million is just over half the $873 million the "disappointing" Superman vs. Batman made back in early 2016, and the final tally will probably fall well short of that figure--the Box Office Guru figuring something on the order $750 million. But it was not quite so big an investment, making it a very healthy return.)

In the process DC has realized what I described a few years ago as a long shot because of (apart from the "myth and magic" basis of Wonder Woman's powers and universe, which it seemed to me was a tougher sell than the pseudo-science behind most superheroes) the limits to DC's screen presence to date, and the soft market for female-led action films.

Of course, quite a lot has happened since--some of it, very helpful indeed for a Wonder Woman film. Warner Brothers firmly committed itself to a Justice League megafranchise comparable to the Marvel Comics Universe, and used the "backdoor" Justice League movie Superman vs. Batman: The Dawn of Justice to introduce new characters, Wonder Woman included.

The situation also changed with regard to the prospects of big-budget action movies with female protagonists. Just to be clear, the female action hero wasn't absent from the screen. There were still plenty of high-profile, big-budget movies featuring action heroines--as part of an ensemble, like the Black Widow (featured in five movies to date). There were plenty of second-string action movies with female leads getting by on lower budgets and lower grosses--like the films of the Underworld and Resident Evil franchises (which have continued up to the present). What there wasn't a lot of were movies combining a first-string production with a female lead between the early 2000s (the underperformance of the Charlie's Angels and Tomb Raider sequels in the summer of 2003, Catwoman winding up a flop in 2004, Aeon Flux becoming another disappointment in 2005, putting studios off) and the middle of this decade, when they began to crop up again. The Hunger Games exploded at the box office (2012), and was followed up by mega-budgeted yet profitable sequels (2013, 2014, 2015), while the big-budgeted sequels to the original, modestly-budgeted, Divergent (2014, 2015) and the $150 million Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) (along with the low-budget but high-grossing Lucy in 2014) reinforced the trend. Still, even if this makes clear what an exaggeration the claims for Wonder Woman as something unprecedented are (both by the studios, and the sycophantic entertainment press), it has some claim to looking like a watershed moment.

That said, the question would seem to be whether such films will now be a commonplace of the cinematic landscape, or prone to the kind of boom and bust seen in the early 2000s. What do you think?