US Comic Store To Host Live Performance of Joss Whedon’s Abandoned Wonder Woman Script
Along with Tim Burton’s ‘Superman Lives’ and George Miller’s ‘Justice League: Mortal,’ there’s another abandoned DC movie whose name lives in infamy (albeit one which didn’t come so quite close to getting made): Joss Whedon’s ‘Wonder Woman.’
The writer-director, still best known at the time as the mastermind behind TV’s ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ was hired by Warner Bros to bring the Amazon superheroine to the big screen back in 2005, hot on the heels of his debut film ‘Serenity.’
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However, Whedon’s take on the character did not find favour with the studio. He and Warner Bros parted ways in 2007, and the film was never made - and so it remained until a doubtless very different ‘Wonder Woman’ finally began production this month, with Gal Gadot in the lead and Patty Jenkins directing.
Particularly since Whedon went on to such monumental success with Marvel’s ‘Avengers’ movies, his ‘Wonder Woman’ has remained a tantalising ‘what if?’ for comic book movie fans.
So it is that a California comic book store The Comic Bug have taken it upon themselves to do a live performance of Whedon’s unproduced script. Set to happen in store in Manhattan Beach on 4 December, the event will also be streamed live online.
On the event’s Facebook page, the team say the event “will probably be the closest opportunity to experiencing Joss Whedon’s vision for the Amazonian Princess,” and promise a “fun and rare experience.”
The title role is to be performed by actress Jennifer Wenger (’in FULL COSTUME,’ we’re promised) with director/actor Curtis Fortier reading Steve Trevor.
In 2014, The Comic Bug hosted a similar live reading of ‘Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods,’ Frank Darabont’s abandoned (and, according to everyone but George Lucas, very good) script for what eventually became ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.’
Discussing what might have been with Rookie Magazine in 2011, Whedon described his take on DC’s iconic heroine as “ a little bit like Angelina Jolie … she sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people….
“The fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane.
“And ultimately her romance with Steve was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess…. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, ‘OK, great, but we can still do better.’”
Whether Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman will in any way reflect this remains to be seen. We’ll find out when she makes her debut in ‘Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice’ which opens on 25 March 2016, with the ‘Wonder Woman’ solo movie to follow in June 2017.
Picture Credit: Warner Bros, DC, WENN
