Warner Bros. Made Director Patty Jenkins Change Wonder Woman Ending “At the Last Minute”

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins says studio Warner Bros. made her change the film’s original ending “at the last minute,” pushing for a larger-scale superhero battle between the eponymous Amazon warrior (Gal Gadot) and Ares (David Thewlis). In the World War I-set Wonder Woman, Diana Prince wrongly believes it’s German Army General Erich Ludendorff (Danny Huston) who is secretly the God of War. When Wonder Woman confronts the real Ares, rejecting his offer to join forces and rid the war-torn world of man, the Themysciran and the Old God clash in an epic battle that was much larger than the ending Jenkins envisioned:

“The original end of the first movie was also smaller, but the studio made me change it at the last minute. So that’s always been a little bit of a bummer that that’s the one thing people talk about, because I agreed,” Jenkins told IGN while promoting sequel Wonder Woman 1984. “And I told the studio we didn’t have time to do it, but it was what it was. I ended up loving it, but that was not the original ending of the movie.”

WW84 pits Diana against Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) and Cheetah (Kristen Wiig), making for a more intimate and smaller-scale showdown that’s no less flashy for a superhero finale.

“This time around, I loved that it has both at the end. We had a visual effects [fight], a big battle which I just dug into and had such a blast executing, which I felt so satisfied with,” Jenkins said. “But ultimately, the end of the movie is much more pared down, and that was really, really fun. No spoilers, there’s all kinds of stuff going on, but it was really fun to shape it differently.”

Despite the oft-criticized ending, Jenkins believes it would have been a “mistake” for Wonder Woman not to pit the superheroine against the God of War in some fashion.

“In my opinion, it would’ve been a mistake to make a first Wonder Woman film without her absolute arch rival nemesis Ares, who is the most classic villain from the lore and is the counterpart of her point of view. She’s a god and he’s a god, and he knows something she doesn’t know and made a choice based on that,” Jenkins says in the Wonder Woman commentary. “He saw the weakness in his father’s creation and is trying to show the world how bad mankind is and therefore annihilate them and get rid of them. She, in the course of her journey, learns the same thing and ends up saying ‘Oh my god, they are all of those things,’ but she makes the opposite choice.”

Jenkins added, “If her story is about a shift in point of view, his storyline is a participant with that story, instead of being a villain bad guy, which is the point of the movie.”

Wonder Woman 1984 releases in theaters and on HBO Max on December 25.