Wonder Woman 1984 Director Patty Jenkins Fought With Warner Bros. Over Winter Release Date

Wonder Woman 1984 Patty Jenkins resisted studio Warner Bros.’ push for a winter 2019 release date, saying her DC Films sequel would have been a “worse movie” if not moved to summer 2020. In July 2017, just weeks after the release of its superhero hit Wonder Woman, the studio set a December 2019 date for the then-untitled sequel. By November, Warner Bros. moved Wonder Woman 2 up six weeks to November 2019, where it remained until October 2018. That’s when star and producer Gal Gadot announced that the sequel, now called WW84, was moving to its “rightful home” of June 5, 2020, three years after the June release of Wonder Woman.

But in March, when Wonder Woman was staring down closed movie theaters due to the coronavirus pandemic, the sequel moved again to August 14. It would leave summer entirely following the studio’s new late-July date for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, jumping to October 2. Weeks before its planned release on the same weekend that DC’s Joker opened in theaters a year earlier, WW84 moved again — for a final time — to Christmas.

Plans changed again when Warner Bros. in November announced WW84 would release in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously on Christmas Day at no extra cost to subscribers. Weeks later, another 17 films would follow the new hybrid model of WW84.

“I never wanted it to come out in the winter. I was fighting the studio because we were supposed to come out summer of 2020, and then they didn’t have a big movie for 2019,” Jenkins told The New York Times. “I was in the middle of making a limited series, and all of a sudden they announced that they had moved up the release date by seven months, which was going to give me way less time to make the movie than I had for Wonder Woman. I was saying, ‘You guys, why would you guarantee I can’t make as good of a film by making it too quick?’”

“So we argued about that all year, and I had to drop out of doing a whole limited series and only do the first two episodes, and just race to write an 80-page treatment at the same time as I’m trying to direct the show,” Jenkins said of her Chris Pine-starring TNT limited series I Am the Night. “We finally got lucky that it got moved back. It would have been a much worse movie if it had come out then.”

After Warners made the call to send WW84 to streaming on the same day it opens in theaters, insiders reported there was a sense at the studio that the movie might “get stale” if it were delayed further to summer or fall 2021. That would have been three years after the Wonder Woman sequel began principal photography midway through 2018.

Jenkins received the call about “two or three weeks” before it was publicly announced.

“It was weird, because the whole year I was afraid of that, and everybody at the studio kept saying, ‘No way, we’ll never do that,’ because you have to make so much money with this thing. So when they suggested it, I was shocked,” Jenkins said. “We did not agree right away — it was a very, very long process, and I don’t know that they would have let us disagree based on what they’ve been doing now. But I was conveniently into it for this movie.”

On the HBO Max move, Gadot put it plainly in a separate interview: “The truth of the matter is we just didn’t have other better options.”

Starring Gal Gadot, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Pine, Wonder Woman 1984 opens in theaters and releases on HBO Max for a limited time on Christmas Day.