DC's *Wonder Woman* Is Said to Be Different. Three Producers Explain the Five Things Behind It

It has reversed the DC universe's slide with critics — and it may bring in bigger box office, too.

"Wonder Woman is the best film in the DC Extended Universe so far. It has the humor this franchise badly needs."

"I love this movie. It reminded me of the Christopher Reeve Superman — a real superhero film, with no anger and no cynicism in it. Exactly what we need right now."

On May 19, the embargo lifted on the first short reactions to the upcoming Wonder Woman. Twitter was quickly taken over by praise this one-sided. The DC Extended Universe finally had a film critics liked. The three films the series had released before this — Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad — all scored low on Rotten Tomatoes, the last two under 30%.

The DC Extended Universe is a film project Warner Bros. started in 2013. It rests on DC Comics, the publisher Warner bought in 1969, and on the superheroes DC owns — Superman, Batman and the rest.

Warner was plainly aiming at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel was then at its peak: from Iron Man to Iron Man 3 it had released seven films that together took more than $5 billion worldwide. If Iron Man could do it, why couldn't Superman?

Warner borrowed the idea of a "universe" — a group of films that share one world, so that characters and stories from different films can meet. Wonder Woman tells how this superhero grew up, and a year earlier she had already fought beside Batman in Batman v Superman. Put simply, a film universe is a long serial drama playing in theaters.

Warner spent heavily to make the DC Extended Universe work. Counting marketing, Batman v Superman cost $410 million, one of the most expensive films ever made anywhere. Twenty DC Extended Universe films have been announced so far, every one of them a standard Hollywood blockbuster with a budget above $100 million.

By box office, the universe is no failure. The three released films have taken $2.286 billion worldwide, enough for each of them, on average, to reach the global top ten for its year.

But it is no success either, least of all Batman v Superman. That film holds a 28% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and headlines like "Dawn of Disappointment," "Even Wonder Woman Can't Save This Mess" and "Why Is It So Bad?" filled the press.

The reviews dragged down the box office. A film that cost $410 million and put the two most famous superheroes in the world on the same poster ended at $873 million worldwide — merely respectable. Marvel's Captain America: Civil War, which opened at almost the same time, took more than $1.1 billion.

Some of the blame went to Warner's haste. Batman v Superman was greenlit only two months after Man of Steel opened. A year later Warner announced ten films at once, booking its most important characters and teams — Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Justice League — at a rate of roughly two films a year.

Nor did Warner plan to do what Marvel did: lay the ground with solo films and close a phase with a team-up. Justice League, with nearly everyone assembled, came just a year after Batman v Superman. Before that, DC's most important superhero, Batman, did not even have a film of his own; most of the solo films were scheduled for later.

The plan drew immediate anger. Most of the press read it as Warner watching Marvel surge ahead and rushing to copy the success of The Avengers. Marvel's order looked sounder to them: the solo films were the groundwork a climactic team-up needed. Warner's version looked impatient, grabbing for a quick win.

But at that point Warner really could not wait. By 2013 both Nolan's Batman trilogy and the Harry Potter series had ended. Warner had no franchise left that produced steady income, and it had lost the title of Hollywood's most profitable studio, which it had held for years running. It needed the DC Extended Universe to fill the hole.

The tone was off, too. Zack Snyder, who directed Batman v Superman and has been a producer across the whole universe, took over Nolan's manner. The DC Extended Universe had superpowered heroes, yet it stayed realist, dark and conflicted.

Nolan's Batman trilogy was successful enough — more than $2.4 billion worldwide. But Nolan cannot be copied, and holding that line was likely to return far less than it had returned for him.

Warner found out that the worry was justified. Man of Steel's interest in immigration and in Superman's unease won it no praise, and the contested ending in which Superman kills his enemy brought more anger still. In Batman v Superman, making Batman a villain displeased many viewers as well. Most people go to the cinema to get away from reality. They wanted brighter, funnier superhero films.

It is because Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad landed so badly that the early praise from people who saw Wonder Woman looks so valuable now. Many read it as a large step forward for the DC Extended Universe.

In fact, things changed inside Warner after Batman v Superman opened, and those changes altered how the DC Extended Universe is run. QDaily interviewed three of its producers — Zack Snyder, Deborah Snyder and Charles Roven. They explained how the change happened, how the current setup works, and why Wonder Woman is different.

1. First, the new chief creative officer really does know DC

The failure of Batman v Superman was the fuse. It set off a shake-up among Warner executives that May. Geoff Johns, chief creative officer of DC Entertainment, was promoted to run the DC Extended Universe; he and another Warner vice president, Jon Berg, would oversee the coming films and the development of the separate television universe.

Over 20 years Johns went from comics fan to one of DC's favored writers; his best-known books are Green Lantern Corps and Crisis on Infinite Earths. When DC Comics was reorganized as DC Entertainment in 2010, Johns was made chief creative officer, charged with carrying DC's characters into television, film and games.

The success of the separate television universe and of several Batman games, plus his standing in comics, made him the obvious person to oversee the films: he had crossed media before, he knew the source material, and he knew what fans like.

What is more interesting is that Johns's stated vision for DC Comics is hope and optimism — the opposite of the heaviness and gloom Batman v Superman was attacked for. The general expectation was that Johns would dilute a director's overpowering personal style and give the universe the brightness audiences were asking for.

His job would go beyond executive producing in the administrative sense. He would produce hands-on, and even work on story and script. His presence is heavy across several coming DC films: screenwriter on The Batman, story on Aquaman and Green Lantern Corps, producer on Justice League, Gotham City Sirens and Justice League Dark.

Hiring this veteran of American comics also convinced outsiders that the DC Extended Universe had a chance to turn things around.

2. Second, directors still have a lot of power

Zack Snyder and Geoff Johns settle the universe's broad frame between them. They decide where the story goes next and sometimes pull story ideas out of the deep comics catalogue for the writers. A director or writer working on a single film has to know where that film sits in the sequence and on the timeline, but has plenty of room as well, because Warner sets great store by a "unique point of view."

"We don't want these movies to look like they all came out of the same committee, off the same assembly line," producer Deborah Snyder told QDaily. "Having directors like Zack, Patty and James Wan means you get to see different characters' stories through their eyes."

It was these people's ideas that grew the series out of Man of Steel into a universe. Zack Snyder says he and screenwriter David S. Goyer came up with Batman v Superman while working on Man of Steel; Justice League came from Chris Terrio, the screenwriter of Argo, while he was writing the Batman v Superman script.

Their ideas let the universe keep changing. Charles Roven, a longtime Warner producer and one of the people running the DC Extended Universe, calls that one of the advantages of working with many directors. The producers hold a rough map in their heads, and the moment a new director or writer arrives, the map changes.

"It's like having a destination in mind, but more than one road leads there. That's what happens when you bring in all kinds of creative people, and it's that question of different points of view we were just talking about."

Zack came out of directing and spends most of his time in this universe as a producer, but he is stubborn about handing power to the director. "That's what we've always tried to do," he told QDaily. "Warner is a filmmaker-driven company. That's their creed — give directors enough room that they never get backed into a corner."

As a director who likes to drop contested scenes into his films, he has gained from that creed himself. The much-criticized sequence in Man of Steel in which Superman kills General Zod — viewers raised on the Reeve Superman held that a figure of justice should not kill — was his idea, and Nolan, then producing, was persuaded and gave it the green light.

DC's biggest rival works nothing like this. At Marvel a creative committee planned the whole series, which left directors very little freedom.

Edgar Wright left Ant-Man over creative differences; Patty Jenkins walked away from Thor: The Dark World when the script could not be agreed. The best-known case is Joss Whedon leaving the MCU after Avengers: Age of Ultron. Under Marvel chief executive Isaac Perlmutter, his shoot was interfered with hard; to keep a shot he loved, he had to agree to add a scene setting up the next film.

Marvel's creative committee has been dissolved, but Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel Studios, still holds enormous control over the films. Remember the effects in Doctor Strange, the buildings and the city folding over on themselves? Feige told the director to add far more of them, until they became the film's main selling point.

The builders of the DC Extended Universe are proud of their directors' particular vision, but that carries real risk.

Zack Snyder is the obvious example. His style is unmistakable: cold filters, slow motion everywhere, an appetite for action, buried salutes to the comics. Reception splits sharply, and the main complaints are always the same — too dark, like a music video, no way in for a casual viewer.

So Warner is learning from Marvel and tightening its grip. Starting with Wonder Woman, the series has grown much brighter, and the Justice League trailer has no shortage of jokes in it either.

Geoff Johns's growing involvement is one way of balancing a director's personal style. One clear sign of it: The Flash has already lost two directors to creative differences. Inside the DC Extended Universe, a director's power has been trimmed. It is not quite as free as Zack Snyder describes.

3. Third, a film has to set itself up and connect the whole universe

Here Marvel supplied the model. In Phase One, films like Thor, Captain America and Iron Man did little more than introduce the characters, rather like the episodes that fill the space between a series' big ones. Once the groundwork was done, The Avengers brought every hero together and became the real climax.

The DC Extended Universe ran the order backwards. Full-cast films like Batman v Superman and Justice League came thick and early, while the solo films were pushed back.

That put a heavy job on Batman v Superman: it had to introduce the other members of the Justice League without making the plot around them feel forced.

Which was, in fact, one of the complaints against it. Wonder Woman's arrival was too abrupt — she has no real relationship with the two men fighting beside her — and the metahuman files felt shoehorned in.

Zack Snyder has an answer for that: "In Batman v Superman, audiences saw who she was finally going to become. They go, wow, where did Wonder Woman come from? What's her story? What has she been through? And then you get the answers in her own movie. It explains who she is and where she comes from."

"That big event that is Batman v Superman has nothing much to do with Wonder Woman's own story, but it did tell the audience how we were going to handle her story," Roven says.

This is delicate work. Zack Snyder describes it as "sewing different worlds into the same tapestry," and calls it the hardest part of building a whole universe. Their method is to fill the gaps an earlier film leaves with clues from a later one, and one film usually becomes the instruction manual for the next.

In the current plan, Justice League is the destination for this phase. "Justice League is, you could say, the spine of this universe," Zack Snyder says. "It guided how we shoot Aquaman, and after it there are a great many new stories, which lets everyone go back and look for clues in Justice League."

Justice League will shape The Flash as well. Once the script is done, Roven says, the film's final shape will be closely tied to Justice League, because the Flash's history and character will be set by the Justice League story. "You can't get away from what's established."

That means directors have to work closely together, however far apart their styles are. Deborah says that everyone does his own job, but there is a community that takes in all the film crews, and the work overlaps. Directors share what they know and talk until they agree. Right now they are talking to James Wan about how to handle Aquaman.

4. How do you bring a comic-book character to life on screen?

Zack Snyder has become the key link between the comics and the films. He made 300 and Watchmen for Warner, the first a talking point out of a dead March release slot, the second an adaptation of a Hugo Award winner everyone agreed was unfilmable — and most readers of the book accepted it. He is also an open fan who knows the source material deeply.

The framing, the Easter eggs and the costumes in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman are full of the fan's own smuggled goods. He wants to put on screen the classic characters and scenes exactly as every comics reader holds them in his head.

On Wonder Woman's costume, he says things in a film shift and change, while in comics you can draw whatever you want. Moving that costume to the screen forced some alterations: they tried to give it a sense of history, to make it look as though it came from somewhere like Paradise Island, with metal and armor protecting her.

"What's interesting is that whenever we take an iconic character out of the comics — Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman — you can tell at a glance when the costume is right. If what you make doesn't match the comics everyone remembers, you've changed too much. So we tried every element she has in the comics, so that the second people see her they know this iconic figure is Wonder Woman."

On the surface, Snyder's screen vision for DC matches what most fans want. When Affleck was announced as Batman, furious fans petitioned the White House website to stop him from taking the part — and then the first still came out, and he moved for the first time in the teaser, and almost everyone went quiet. The Kryptonian fight in Man of Steel and Batman saving Martha in Batman v Superman went the same way: both were widely granted to be "faithful to the comics."

Character is where Snyder keeps getting questioned, for straying from who these people are. Not everyone likes the angle he takes on the heroes. In the comics every character has spawned many versions under many writers, and picking one of them is certain to upset the people who prefer another. Every filmmaker adapting comics has to live with that.

So how do you balance comics and film in front of fans this hard to please? Snyder's answer: "I love DC fans. I'm a fan myself. So I feel it too, especially when I see something I love up on the screen... Our goal is to bring the characters to life and deliver as much of a childhood dream as we can. In the end, though, you still have to go with a director's instincts."

5. What comes next for the DC Extended Universe, and what is in its way?

For now the DC Extended Universe is expanding at its own pace. Some of the news looks bad. DC, still not recovered from the reviews, announced that Nightwing, Gotham City Sirens and Batgirl were on the schedule, which again raised the question of whether Warner is moving too fast. And Ben Affleck giving up the director's chair on The Batman, after Live by Night — which he wrote, directed and starred in — failed badly, set off plenty of speculation.

Amid the rumors there is some confirmed good news: Matt Reeves, who directed Cloverfield, takes over The Batman from Affleck, and The Flash is close to a director, with Kingsman's Matthew Vaughn the favorite.

Fifteen DC Extended Universe projects are still unreleased, and the field remains open. "In the DC Extended Universe, anything can happen," Zack Snyder says. "Saying much more might be a spoiler. But I think I can tell you this: the stories we can draw on fill a huge, fascinating palette, and everyone should be looking forward to where they might lead."

Then a piece of breaking news on May 23 made the future uncertain again. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder said his 20-year-old daughter, Autumn Snyder, had taken her own life in March. He had meant to work through it: "But I realized later that we really do have to step away for a while and be with the kids who need me... I know what this will start up online. They'll do that whatever happens. And the truth is I don't care about any of it now."

Warner's first move was to push back the release of Justice League, and Snyder turned it down. He went to Joss Whedon, already set to direct Batgirl, and Whedon will take over what Snyder had left, finishing post-production and a small amount of reshooting.

"There will be very little shooting, and it will fit Zack's style and tone completely. We're not introducing new characters, only a few new scenes," Warner chairman Toby Emmerich said, answering the doubts about how two directors' styles would come together.

The bigger problem is a market where audiences appear to be tiring of superheroes. Avengers: Age of Ultron did not beat the first film, and Captain America: Civil War, sold as "Avengers 2.5," came in slightly under Age of Ultron. Ten years of superhero films have left audiences full, which is why Deadpool, with its odd look and a freshness nobody had felt in a while, succeeded unexpectedly.

Asked what freshness the DC Extended Universe can offer, Snyder's answer was history: DC's classic characters and its deep supply of stories.

"When you travel around the world, you see a lot of people wearing Batman or Superman T-shirts," Deborah adds. "Each of the big three has more than 75 years behind him, and their stories are still going today, and they're welcomed all over the world, not just by American audiences but by audiences everywhere. That tells you something. There's a reason for it."

The pull of the comics needs no explaining. Freshness and distinctiveness in a film are another matter. The strategy the DC Extended Universe can hold to is probably still this one: let different directors make very different films in the way each of them does best. It will annoy some people. But a creative team has to decide in the end which road it wants to take, and what it is willing to give up to take it.

Cover image and inline images are film stills.