scrowe
Distinguished Member
That is simply not the case at all.
Patty Jenkins Recalls the "Internal War on Every Level" with WB in 'Wonder Woman's Early Days
Director Patty Jenkins opens up about the internal war with Warner Bros. on the Wonder Woman character on an episode of WTF with Marc Maron.collider.com
From the above.
Jenkins also shed light on why she was initially hired for Wonder Woman before leaving the project for a time, opening up room for director Michelle McClaren to get hired while Jenkins pursued Thor: The Dark World, a job that ultimately didn't pan out. She shared, "Finally, the moment came [when Warners wanted me to make the film] and there was a moment they wanted to make a story that I wasn’t the right person for, so I [left and] said, 'It can’t be me,' and they hired someone else [MacClaren] for a little bit. I told them what kind of film I wanted to make. I said, 'I don’t think this is the story you should tell with Wonder Woman,' and I didn’t want to be the one to get in a fight about it for years."
During the period of time Jenkins left Wonder Woman the first time and later came back, she got a sinking feeling about Warner Bros. not having complete faith in the potential success of the movie. She told Maron, "During that period of time, there were so many scripts, I could see the writing on the wall. The was an internal war on every level about what Wonder Woman should be."
Jenkins went on to explain how things finally smoothed over to the point that some actual progress could be made on the movie. Per Jenkins, Warner Bros. eventually came back to her after McClaren left — "Actually, do you wanna make it your way?" — and, as the director notes, "Boom, I just made the movie."
Actually I think the above is pretty 'new' details that were not well known before. I don't think Patty Jenkins was ever officially hired back in 2004 to do Wonder Woman, she may have been in discussions behind the scenes at the time, I accept. The reason is, its hard to find anything official on this, whereas you can find releases/news articles around Patty getting hired for Thor 2, Joss Whedon getting hired for WW in 2005/2006, then Michelle McClaren getting hired, but nothing on Patty Jenkins getting hired for WW before she replaced Michelle McClaren. But happy to be proved wrong.
I also believe @Coulson is correct, once Patty came onboard the story was written and most of the pre-prod was complete, that isn't to say she didn't have input on how the movie was made/directed, and tone, and would have had no doubt influence on changes/edits to the story/script, but she certainly didn't conceive the movie from scratch, she was a Director for Hire, in as much as that means when it comes to directing movies.
Accepting that a lot of these stories/interviews were done, prior to release, I hope she dials back on some of the "look how great I am versus the evil studios" rhetoric that I keep reading, because she made a bad movie, that in ordinary theatrical release would have flopped very badly, down to Birds of Prey level, given how bad the word of mouth would have been, it would have opened very strong but then plummeted, in my opinion. Releasing on HBO Max in the major marker may well be the best thing that could have happened to her.