The reactions to Wonder Woman 1984 continue to span the entire spectrum, and just a couple of days after it became the first DCEU movie since Joss Whedon’s Justice League to drop to a Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel has just about crawled back into Fresh territory, where it currently sits right on the threshold at 60%.
Trying to quantify the success of the superhero pic is difficult given the circumstances, especially when it was once named as the most highly anticipated blockbuster of 2020 and stood a real chance of reaching a billion dollars at the box office. So far, Diana Prince’s second solo outing has made $131 million from theaters, which isn’t even close to recouping the budget, but Warner Bros. must have been happy enough with the HBO Max numbers to fast-track Wonder Woman 3 into development two days after 1984 was released.
This drew a line under the speculation that director Patty Jenkins might not return, the flames of which she fanned herself, but it does feel as though it’ll be her last time at the helm, even if she admitted that there were two more Wonder Woman stories she wanted to tell. Star Gal Gadot, meanwhile, was recently asked what we could expect from the third chapter, and though she didn’t reveal any details, the use of the word ‘closure’ is interesting nonetheless.
“We’ll have to wait and see. You want to see a third movie, I want to see a third movie, too, to have a nice closure.”
Of course, most big budget spectacle-driven movies are designed with a trilogy in mind, so it would make sense for the team of Jenkins and Gadot to temporarily draw a line under their association with the Amazonian warrior in Wonder Woman 3 and move onto other things, without having to definitively rule out a return one day in the future.