I Made a Wonder Woman Scorecard so You Wouldn’t Have To (no spoilers!)
So Wonder Woman is looking like it’s going to be the first good DC movie since 2008. And that’s amazing! It’s also the highest budget woman-directed movie in history…even though at $120 million it’s a pretty conservative budget for a superhero summer blockbuster. For comparison: Man of Steel cost $225 million. Even Ant-Man cost $130 million. They’re making a DCEU tentpole save-the-franchise flick with less-than-Ant-Man money. I mean, at least it’s got a bigger budget than Deadpool?
Still, though, this is going to be a great and important movie no matter what—honestly we’re way overdue for a successful lady superhero flick (superheroines have been bombing at the box office since 1984).
But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good Wonder Woman movie!
It could still be a disappointing adaptation or one that strays away from the most amazing things about the character (her commitment to peace, her radical kindness, her feelings of duty towards mankind).
And for a diehard Wondy fan like me, that would be a serious disappointment even if the movie is good.
And so I made this bingo board…Scrabble board? Let’s call it more like a map…of the two Wonder Woman movies they might be making. One is horrible garbage (the blue squares, which are blue for Ares’s armor) and one is awesome and the Wonder Woman movie they should totally be making (the gold squares, which are gold for the Lasso of Truth).
You can probably gather my biggest pet peeves from the blue squares. It is in fact possible to make a Wonder Woman movie that is what you might call “anti-woman” and the blue squares are that movie. These are all pretty much things that have happened in Wondy stories before! Most of them even happened in that 2009 Wonder Woman animated movie that people apparently liked but I totally hated—you know, that one where Steve Trevor said OUT LOUD to WONDER WOMAN’S MOM: “God, your daughter’s got a nice rack.”
THAT REALLY HAPPENED and that whole movie is trash and tbh its biggest mistake was reducing Themyscira’s isolationist stance to “misandry” and Man’s World’s ignorance and violence to “not being polite enough to women” AND THEN it decided to SOLVE those two WRONG PROBLEMS by having Steve Trevor be incandescently rude to the second-most powerful hero in the DC universe (I will accept arguments for the Martian Manhunter or Captain Atom for #2 but no one else Billy Batson can just get out of my face) while also nonstop hitting on her. Eventually he, like, realizes that women can be “just as tough” as men and they get together or something, I guess. Honestly folks, I didn’t finish the movie.
But I have a lot of hope that they’re making the good movie that I laid out in gold up there! It’s one that lines up more closely with MY favorite Wonder Woman origin story: the 1980’s George Pérez one.
His Amazons don’t leave man’s world because they “hate” men or whatever; they’re granted immortality and sent to Paradise Island by the gods but it’s actually kind of a punishment for embracing violence and vengeance? Steve Trevor, by the way, is in in his forties or fifties in this story and is not a love connection for Diana at all and CERTAINLY doesn’t comment on her boobs in front of her mom.
All that stuff in red is the stuff that I’m almost certain we will see in this movie. It’s not GOOD stuff; I hope we won’t have to deal with the boring bondage jokes (I like the campy kink in the early comics too but there are better ways to pay homage than just taking cheap shots at it) and old-timey sexism is a bit of a drag—but red squares won’t ruin this movie for me.
A lot of what makes Wonder Woman my favorite — and one of the👏best👏 superheroes👏 of 👏 all👏 time👏 — is right there in her origin story.
If you mess the origin up you find yourself with a really different kind of character. The Diana who was, say, raised by militant isolationist man-haters who lied to her and told her she was made of clay when she was in fact the daughter of Zeus (the main thrust of her origin in what is otherwise a pretty good Wonder Woman run and also what they’re probably basing the movie on) is REALLY PRETTY DIFFERENT from the Wonder Woman who was truly made of clay and raised by a thousand mothers in an immortal feminist paradise.
I want immortal feminist island paradise Diana! I want the gold squares! And I really think that this movie might give them to me. So let’s take our scorecards into the theaters and hope against hope that we get more lasso and less war god.
Zoë Smith is converting her dorkiness into social capital with graduate education. She starts at the University of Chicago’s PhD program in the fall.
