Warner Bros. has internally discussed initiating a “formidable awards-season campaign” for Wonder Woman, aiming to land nominations for Best Picture as well as Best Director for Patty Jenkins.
Landing both honors would make Wonder Woman the first comic book movie to be nominated for Hollywood’s most prestigious award, and would make Patty Jenkins the first Best Director nominee to be tapped for helming a comic book movie.
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Should she be nominated, Jenkins would continue to burst ceilings with Wonder Woman, which has already broken records as the highest-grossing movie directed by a woman, and which stands as the top-grossing summer movie of the year with a global box office pull of $781.854 million after 55 days in theaters.
The last woman — and the only woman — to win Best Director was Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), who is one of just four female Best Director nominees, including Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties), Jane Campion (The Piano), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation).
Warner Bros. will reintroduce Wonder Woman to audiences closer to awards season in the fall alongside launching a likely costly awards campaign, which generally consist of advertising, watermarked screeners, screenings, and talent making their awards campaigns in both California and New York.
The fourth film of Warner’s DC Cinematic Universe following Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman is currently the only DC Films production to be classified as “fresh” on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with a rating of 92%, placing it among the best-reviewed comic book movies of all time.
Wonder Woman‘s near-universal praise places it on par with The Avengers (92%) and Spider-Man: Homecoming, just above Captain America: Civil War (90%) and Guardians of the Galaxy (91%), and just below Logan (93%), Spider-Man 2 (94%) and The Dark Knight (94%).
Previously, another Warner Bros. and DC production, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, failed to secure a best picture nomination despite high critical acclaim and massive box office success. The snubbing of The Dark Knight, as many called it, lead to the Academy Awards to expand the Best Picture category from five films to ten. And nearly a decade later, with ten slots, Wonder Woman has a chance at garnering a Best Picture nomination — though it may have to contend with Warner’s own Dunkirk, as the studio will reportedly “bring out the big guns” for the war drama and director Christopher Nolan.
Most recently, Suicide Squad took home the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini, and Christopher Nelson. Wonder Woman will come to Blu-ray and Digital HD this fall, before Gal Gadot returns to theaters as the Amazonian warrior in Justice League, out November 17th. Warner Bros. recently announced a Wonder Woman sequel for December 2019.
In Wonder Woman, before she was Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), she was Diana, princess of the Amazons, trained to be an unconquerable warrior. Raised on a sheltered island paradise, Diana meets an American pilot (Chris Pine) who tells her about the massive conflict that’s raging in the outside world. Convinced that she can stop the threat, Diana leaves her home for the first time. Fighting alongside men in a war to end all wars, she finally discovers her full powers and true destiny.
