If you thought Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 was just another superhero sequel, producer Charles Roven would like you to think again. Roven tells Vulture that Jenkins never envisioned doing a sequel and that the film is more of a standalone effort, picking up on a different story centered on the Amazonian hero.
Roven,, who has produced pretty much every major DCEU film and even goes back to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, says Wonder Woman 1984 won’t be a direct tie-in to 2017’s hit movie, and that’s exactly how Jenkins wanted it…
“She was just determined that this movie should be the next iteration of Wonder Woman but not a sequel. And she’s definitely delivering on that. It’s a completely different time frame and you’ll get a sense of what Diana-slash–Wonder Woman had been doing in the intervening years. But it’s a completely different story that we’re telling. Even though it’ll have a lot of the same emotional things, a lot of humor, a lot of brave action. Tugs at the heart strings as well.”
Whether he’s right or not depends on your definition of a sequel. Must a sequel carryover certain plot threads, or can it be a completely isolated story featuring the same characters and in the same universe? The latter is the case here, it seems, which is why another source describes the film as “a stand-alone film in the same way that Indiana Jones or Bond films are, instead of one continuous story that requires many installments.”
Maybe that means Chris Pine’s strange return as Steve Trevor is part of a flashback or memory, rather than a return from the dead? Wonder Woman 1984 opens June 5th 2020 with Gal Gadot back as Diane Prince, Kristen Wiig as Cheetah, and Pedro Pascal in an undisclosed role.
