It must be enormously satisfying to be Patty Jenkins right now. The filmmaker made a hell of a directorial debut with the Oscar-winning “Monster,” but struggled, as female directors often do, to find financing for a follow-up feature. Finally, she landed the job of directing Marvel’s “Thor: The Dark World,” only to part ways with the studio over creative differences (the film went on to be pretty much the worst in the MCU: Marvel still haven’t hired a solo female helmer).
Finally, after more than proving herself on the small screen, Jenkins landed a mega-movie job, with “Wonder Woman.” She faced a tough task — not just a hero who’d been tough to pull off screen before, but also battling with the Warner Bros/DC machinery who’d delivered critically reviled movies in the years prior. But Jenkins nailed it — “Wonder Woman” was a genuinely heroic superhero movie, won terrific reviews, and is by some distance the best-grossing DC Extended Universe movie domestically (taking $80 million more than “Batman V. Superman”), and the number one movie of 2017 too.
Fans have been vehement in their desire to see Jenkins return for the inevitable sequel, and it looks like Jenkins is being properly rewarded: in fact, she’s almost certainly become the best-paid female director in history. According to Variety, Jenkins will be getting around $8 million to direct “Wonder Woman 2” (and The Hollywood Reporter say it could be as high as $10 million), and that’s not even including her slice of the back-end, which is likely to be considerable. That’s apparently enough to make her the best-paid female director ever.
Which is mostly, to be honest, not that surprising, if only because the competition is relatively slim: the top-grossing female filmmakers before Jenkins have either been relatively little-known animation helmers like “Frozen” director Jennifer Lee, or helmers of lower-budget comedies like Amy Heckerling, Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron. So few women have gotten opportunities to direct movies of this scale that Jenkins is in a club more or less of one at the minute.
Hopefully, she’s helping to pave the way, and things are changing, glacially — Ava DuVernay’s got the expensive “A Wrinkle In Time” coming next year, for instance, though not being an established brand, her paycheck is likely much lower. But depressingly, it wasn’t necessarily that easy to get Jenkins to this point — The Hollywood Reporter describes the negotiations as “challenging,” in part because the filmmaker rightly insisted on getting a payday equivalent to what a male director would get after a hit of this size. And even then, it’s still less than what Justin Lin is reportedly getting to make a “Hot Wheels” movie ($11-12m), and that’s coming off the underperformance of “Star Trek Beyond.”
That said, there’s still a way to go before the glass ceiling is entirely shattered — Christopher Nolan and Peter Jackson made at least $20 million for “Interstellar” and “King Kong” respectively. Hopefully it won’t be long before Jenkins, or another female director, is making that kind of bank.