It’s hard to believe that it took decades to finally bring the most iconic female superhero to the big screen in her own movie. Now that Wonder Woman has finally hit theaters, audiences around the world who may not be familiar with her origin story are finally going to understand why Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is who she is.
The road to bringing Wonder Woman to life involved many different writers attempting to pen the best script possible. The film has been through different visions before principal photography began, and before Patty Jenkins was attached as the director – it was Michelle MacLaren who was originally set to bring the project to life.
Collider spoke with producer Charles Roven about the process in crafting the best script for the Patty Jenkins film:
Really early on, before Patty came on the project, we put our toe in the water with two writers. They took completely different approaches on the material—one was the Crimean War and one was World War I, but a completely different World War I experience. We had quite a Writers Guild arbitration with a number of writers because we had a lot of writers, and then there were the preceding writers and the other incarnations of the development of Wonder Woman. But for our Wonder Woman we didn’t like the ultimate take on those scripts, even though they’re talented guys, and Zack [Snyder] and Allan Heinberg then collaborated on a story. We had a different director on at that time, and that director—which was OK’d by the studio—brought a number of writers on. We had more writers working with—everybody had knowledge because you can’t do it with the Writers Guild without telling everybody what you’re doing and everybody has to be OK—but we had more writers working at the same time than I’ve ever done. In the history of all the movies that I’ve done, it never worked out that way before.
The film credits writer Allan Heinberg for the screenplay. Heinberg also shares story credit along with Justice League director Zack Snyder and Pan screenwriter Jason Fuchs.
While there are things that most of [the other writers] contributed that are in the script, there wasn’t anybody who ended up making such a contribution that they were able to get a credit. A guy by the name of Jason Fuchs got the third position in the ‘Story By’ so it’s Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs, but Allan Heinberg got the full screenplay credit. Even though after he wasn’t able to finish working—he had to go back to the TV series that he was working on—Geoff Johns and Patty did a tremendous amount of collaboration. But again based on the rules they weren’t allowed to get any credit, but they did a lot of writing that stuck. So that’s the long-winded version of the answer being that we had a basic arc of a story, but scene to scene it really came together when Patty got involved.
The road to crafting the best script for the film really paid off in the long run. Thanks to the script as well as Jenkins’ impeccable direction, Wonder Woman is a major home run not just for the DC Extended Universe, but for the entire comic book film genre.
Wonder Woman is in theaters now.
Source: Collider
