Patty Jenkins Reveals Why She Almost Didn’t Direct Wonder Woman 1984

In a recent interview with the Happy Sad Confused Podcast (h/t JoBlo), Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins revealed that she almost didn’t direct the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, due to a dispute with Warner Bros. over money. Jenkins claims that Warner Bros. originally offered her a much lower amount of money to direct the sequel than many male directors in the same situation got.

“I started to walk away,” she said. “I was gonna’ walk away. I even said I’d be happy to go to another studio and make a quarter as much because it’s not a sequel, on principle, no problem. It’s interesting as someone who never made any profit in my career up until Wonder Woman, that I was always at peace with it. I was like, ‘Hey I get it.’ But now I was like, ‘Listen, I never made any money in my career because you always had the leverage and I didn’t.’ But now the shoe is on the other foot so it’s time to turn the tables.”

“I don’t want to talk about a quote system that’s boxed me out and it’s not even true,” Jenkins continued. “It was easy to find that all of the men not just had quotes, they’d made an independent film and then a first [superhero] movie. They got paid seven times more than me for the first superhero movie. Then on the second one, they got paid more than me still. It was an easy fight to say, ‘This can’t be. It super can’t be. And it really can’t be on Wonder Woman…It was an interesting thing to do, but it was an easy thing to do in the fact I was dead serious. That I was like ‘If I can’t be victorious in this regard, then I’m letting everyone down.’ If not me, who? So it became something I became very, very, very passionate about.”

Jenkins was recently announced as the director of an upcoming new Star Wars movie called Roque Squadron which will be released in 2023.

Wonder Woman 1984 hits theaters and HBO Max on December 25th.