Thirty-nine years after Richard Donner’s “Superman,” 28 after Tim Burton’s “Batman,” 17 after Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” and nearly 10 after “Iron Man,” it’s completely insane that we’re only just getting the first female director of a superhero movie. There are literally dozens of women who are equally as talented and qualified, if not much more so, than the likes of David Ayer, Alan Taylor, Marc Webb, Gavin Hood, Brett Ratner, Louis Leterrier or Jon Watts, to name but a few, and yet it’s only early next month that that particular glass window will finally shatter with the release of Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman.”
Even then, it’s pretty infuriating that female directors, like Jenkins or “Captain Marvel” co-director Anna Boden, are so far seemingly restricted to female-led superhero properties (and even then, not all of them: Ayer will direct “Gotham City Sirens,” for instance), but if “Wonder Woman” proves a success, hopefully that’ll start to change, because in a new AP profile of Jenkins, there’s some indication that the director might have already lined up her next job, and it’s with one of the biggest stars on the planet.
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In the piece, Jenkins talks about her comfort with big-budget properties, saying that “Wonder Woman” is likely on the higher end even of superhero-blockbuster budgets, and saying that she’s used to similar scale with TV (“A pilot that you shoot in 9 days for $10 million ends up being a very big parallel to this,” she says. “It’s the same dollar per day. So many men have crossed over… it’s the same job, just on a larger scale.”) And she appears to have convinced megastar Dwayne Johnson, who says he’d like Jenkins to direct the “Jungle Cruise” movie that he’s been developing with Disney, based on the theme-park ride of the same name.
“Patty has that really cool edge,” Johnson tells the AP. “I felt like she could be a really cool choice for a movie like ‘Jungle Cruise.’ Plus, you know what? I’m just a big fan.” It’s very early days — it’s still at the shortlist phase on the project, and Johnson says that he’s not even sure if Jenkins knows about his interest yet. But it’s encouraging, albeit about 70 years too late, that a female director is being considered to helm a big-budget project that doesn’t literally have the word ‘Woman’ in the title.