‘Wonder Woman 1984’: Patty Jenkins Was ‘Shocked’ to Find Out the Movie Would Stream on HBO Max
Wonder Woman 1984 recently premiered, after several postponements to the movie’s release date. However, the action movie didn’t get as large of a theatrical release as originally planned. How does the director of Wonder Woman 1984, Patty Jenkins, feel about the movie’s digital debut on the streaming service, HBO Max?
‘Wonder Woman 1984’ director Patty Jenkins on the movie’s limited box office release
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Jenkins reflected on the reaction to her first Wonder Woman film.
“There were plenty of people at the studio who didn’t quite understand or were not very confident in the film,” she revealed. Executives complained the movie was “too funny” or that Gadot was “too soft.”
“But then on the night of the premiere, everything changed on a dime, and watching people freak out and react to the things I wanted them to react to was amazing,” Jenkins explained.
For Wonder Woman 1984, it won’t be the same.
“I’m so sad I’m not getting that this time,” the filmmaker told The Times. “It’s such a bummer.”
Jenkins reviews the arduous process of getting ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ made
The new superhero flick began streaming on Christmas Day 2020 — even though Jenkins told the publication she “never wanted it to come out in the winter.”
The timeline of this movie’s release has been wonky for a while, as Jenkins explained. She told The New York Times:
I was fighting the studio because we were supposed to come out summer of 2020, and then they didn’t have a big movie for 2019. I was in the middle of making a limited series, and all of a sudden they announced that they had moved up the release date by seven months, which was going to give me way less time to make the movie than I had for Wonder Woman.
Jenkins finally asked the studio: “You guys, why would you guarantee I can’t make as good of a film by making it too quick?”
After going back and forth about that issue “all year,” Jenkins says she eventually had to leave the limited series after 2 episodes. At the same time, she was trying to “race to write an 80-page treatment.”
“We finally got lucky that it got moved back,” Jenkins continued. “It would have been a much worse movie if it had come out then.”
Jenkins was ‘shocked’ by the decision to put the full movie on streaming
Still, the pandemic pushed back the release date even further.
“Wonder Woman 1984 slipped from its initial June 2020 release date to August, October and then Christmas,” The New York Times reported. Then, the studio decided to also stream Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO’s digital platform.
Jenkins admitted in the interview that she was “shocked” by the announcement to put her film on HBO Max.
“It was weird, because the whole year I was afraid of that, and everybody at the studio kept saying, ‘No way, we’ll never do that,’ because you have to make so much money with this thing,” the filmmaker explained.
So once the studio finally suggested the streaming option, Jenkins told The Times: “I was shocked.”
However, the Wonder Woman 1984 director seems overall satisfied with how it all worked out.
“We did not agree right away — it was a very, very long process, and I don’t know that they would have let us disagree based on what they’ve been doing now,” Jenkins shared. “But I was conveniently into it for this movie.”
How did the movie do at the box office?
Also, as the Washington Post recently reported, Wonder Woman 1984 did pretty well at the box office, despite the health crisis.
The movie apparently “garnered $16.7 million in the United States during the Friday-Sunday Christmas holiday weekend, or nearly 2 million tickets sold,” according to the paper. This also means the Wonder Woman sequel beat out earlier 2020 releases: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, as well as the new Croods movie.
Per the Post, that’s nothing to sneeze at:
Those are the highest three-day totals for any new movie in American theaters since pandemic lockdowns began last March — a noteworthy and even surprising result given the fact that the movie was concurrently available to consumers at home.
