Wonder Woman 1984 Director Patty Jenkins Has Mixed Feelings About HBO Max Release

Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins says she has the "weirdest mix of feelings" about her movie's day-and-date streaming release on HBO Max, where the Wonder Woman sequel is available to watch until January 24. WW84 became the biggest movie to go straight-to-streaming when AT&T-owned WarnerMedia announced a Christmas Day HBO Max premiere on the same day it opens in theaters, which would precede the company's decision to send this year's entire 17-movie slate to streaming. Days after its streaming debut, Warner Bros. announced a WW84 sequel reuniting Jenkins and Gal Gadot in a theatrically-released Wonder Woman 3.

"I have the weirdest mix of feelings. Because I never would have thought I could be okay with this, never. I'm a pure theatrical experience person," Jenkins said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. "However, as the year went on, and suddenly when this idea came up of doing it this way at Christmas, it felt so right. I was like, 'Now is the moment. I myself am craving seeing the film, I'm craving what that film has in it,' and I've seen it so many times I can't handle seeing it again. But I'm thirsty for positivity, and bigness, and escape, and all of those things."

Jenkins added she's "devastated that there are gonna be people who can't see it at all, because they can't figure out how to stream it or they can't get to a theater, but I feel incredible about getting to share something that we love and worked on with people on the heels of, and in the midst of, such a dark time."

Star and producer Gadot previously explained there were no "better options" for WW84, which already changed release dates six times and was at risk of growing stale if delayed further into mid-to-late 2021.

"Look, if you would have told me a year ago that that's gonna be the case, I would flip out and be super angry. But the truth of the matter is we just didn't have other better options," Gadot told Digital Spy about the decision to go to streaming. "We felt like we were sitting on this movie for such a long time, we shot the movie in 2018, we started promoting the movie in 2019, we pushed the movie four times. We felt like the movie was so relevant to what's happening in the world right now that you come to a place at a certain time where you're like, 'OK, I just want people to watch the movie.'"

Starring Gal Gadot, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Pine, Wonder Woman 1984 is now in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.