Why isn’t Michelle MacLaren directing Wonder Woman anymore?
According to the official statement from Warner Bros., MacLaren’s departure is due to “creative differences.”
“’Creative differences’ is a common term used in Hollywood to basically say: we don’t want you on this movie anymore, but we can’t say you’re fired,” said Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, by phone.
Wonder Woman would have been a first for MacLaren: MacLaren, a well-known entity in television, would be making her feature directorial debut.
Is it possible MacLaren is the one who initiated the split? “I haven’t heard a lot of people say that,” said Silverstein. “She’s not the one with the power here; the studio was the one with the power. Maybe she walked away, but I doubt it. It’s a big gig. It’s not really something you walk away from unless it’s just the worst thing ever.”
“They don’t believe stories about women are as important as stories about men.”
MacLaren wasn’t even supposed to be the first woman to direct a superhero blockbuster. That long-overdue honor should have belonged to Patty Jenkins, who was signed on to direct Thor 2. Jenkins was dropped due to, what do you know, “creative differences,” but The Hollywood Reporter cited sources who say Jenkins “was fired without warning from a job that would have made her the first woman to direct a superhero tentpole.” Natalie Portman, who had championed Jenkins’ hiring, reportedly agreed to stay involved in the Thor series because Jenkins would be at the helm, and she was “especially proud that she would have played a role in opening the door for a woman to direct such a film.”
Jenkins was replaced with a man, Alan Taylor, best known for his work on television shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men.
Silverstein cited the similar case of Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first Twilight movie but was replaced for subsequent installments. Some speculated at the time that Hardwicke was fired “for being difficult on set,” but Hardwicke later said the problem was Summit wouldn’t give her the time and money she needed to make the movies the way they needed to be made. “Then they hired a man, [Chris Weitz], and gave him more time and money,” said Silverstein.
Asked if Warner Bros. could get away with that kind of bait-and-switch for Wonder Woman — wouldn’t the optics of replacing MacLaren with a man be disastrous? — Silverstein said, “I’m not sure, because I think that people lose interest. Maybe they’ll get a hit for a couple days, and people will move on. Maybe they’ll feel like they can take the heat. The script is written by a man, too.”
How is it that the comic book industrial complex can see something as long-forgotten as Guardians of the Galaxy or as lame-sounding as Ant-Man through post-production but can’t manage to get Wonder Woman off the ground?
Wonder Woman is an infamously troubled property. She has yet to get a movie of her own. Joss Whedon (who went on to direct 2012’s The Avengers) tried to make Wonder Woman with Warner Bros. but everything fell apart; he told Entertainment Weekly that the movie “was a waste of my time. We never [wanted] to make the same movie.” The most recent effort, a television reboot starring Adrianne Palicki (Tyra Colette from Friday Night Lights), was dead on arrival. David E. Kelley’s NBC’s pilot, produced for the 2011–12 TV season, was killed before it ever aired. The script leaked before filming and an unfinished version of the pilot wound up on the internet; critics ripped both apart.
“You just keep thinking that they can’t fuck it up,” said Silverstein. “And then they do, at every turn.”
Part of the problem is no one seems to know who Wonder Woman is for: is she a knockout in hot shorts for male consumption or a Buffy/Katniss-like icon for women to celebrate? “Wonder Woman has so many layers of issues related to it. Especially, how she is going to be portrayed, in terms of appearances and how we live in the world today?” said Silverstein. “We’ve seen what Gal Gadot is going to wear in Batman v Superman. She’s not naked, but…” But:
As for what Godot will probably do in Batman v. Superman, Silverstein speculated, “she’ll probably be another sidekick, like Scarlett Johannson” in The Avengers. “That’s what I worry about… It’s all about male stories. The paradigm is male for all of these things. When you are a woman, you are an outsider.”
If anyone is primed to break in, though, it’s MacLaren, who helmed some of the most outstanding, memorable episodes of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. She is responsible for the spaghetti Western-style standoff in “To’hajiilee,” the battle against a grizzly in “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” the tequila-poisoning killings by the pool in “Salud,” the jail execution montage in “Gliding Over All”. It is reasonable to expect a Wonder Woman under her direction would have been explosive and epic and all kinds of excellent.
Yet the superhero-director pantheon remains a No Girls Allowed zone. Would it be so very hard if just one of these movies — wild suggestion, but maybe the one with the word “woman” in the title could be a cool place to start — catered to what female audiences crave?
“Even though statistics and data show that women buy half the movie tickets, are half the audience, are going in growing numbers, still, they believe that they’re not making these movies for women,” said Silverstein.
“The big narratives of our time, these superhero action movies, these are the stories that people are seeing,” she said. “And when women are just not there, it says that our stories don’t matter, that we don’t count. And I think this is incredibly problematic.”
This sets up a doomed-to-fail scenario for anyone who lands in the director’s chair.
When it comes to the struggle to get Wonder Woman to the big screen, “I do believe it’s about vision and [studios] don’t trust women’s visions and women’s voices, and I think that’s part of the singular problem in getting these movies made,” said Silverstein. “They don’t believe stories about women are as important as stories about men.”
Or, more importantly, they don’t think stories are as important as the larger franchises those stories must feed. Today’s superhero movies never get to just be movies: they are forever in service to an ever-growing galaxy of movies, and so what we are left with when we’re watching, say, The Avengers, is not a standalone film so much as it is three hours of explosions, in-jokes, and references that will only resonate if you have seen Thor, Captain America, and every Iron Man.
This sets up a doomed-to-fail scenario for anyone who lands in the director’s chair. In order to get hired for one of these jobs, a director needs to present a clear vision. But anyone with a strong vision isn’t going to do this strange, demanding task well: it’s a job for someone who takes direction, not someone who gives it.
That strain was enough to wear out Whedon, who told Vulture last week that he won’t be sticking around to oversee Avengers number three. As Kyle Buchanan wrote, “Whedon also had to craft Age of Ultron to function as the climax to the several Marvel movies released right before it, in addition to setting up sequels and stand-alones to come. That ongoing shared universe has been the creative masterstroke of Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, but it doesn’t always sit easily with his filmmakers, who are more concerned with making their own movie than integrating someone else’s.”
Whedon’s response to all this? “With so much at stake, there’s gonna be friction.”
MacLaren isn’t the only directer to be ousted from a comic book production due to “creative differences”: Edgar Wright was dropped from Ant-Man last May, even though he’d been attached to the project since 2006. The problem? Evangeline Lilly, Ant-Man’s female lead, told Buzzfeed that Wright’s version of Ant-Man “wouldn’t have fit in the Marvel Universe. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb, no matter how good it was.”
DC Comics is also plucking Superman and Batman from their separate worlds and shoving them into a movie together, the much-hyped Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. (That won’t be out until 2016, but it’s not like presidential candidates have a monopoly on talking about a year that is still eight freaking months away.) A ten-movie plan is already in place for these guys, though one of the ten is supposed to be Wonder Woman, still slated to premiere in 2017. This act of claiming dates so far in the future even a DeLorean could have trouble getting you there is all very mature and delightful. It’s a kind of licking-all-the-cookies-so-no-one-else-can-eat-them strategy writ large, and the effect is a sense of comic conglomerate inevitability.
It’s not a coincidence that the best superhero movie of 2014 was Guardians of the Galaxy, a long-overlooked property that, with no obligations to projects about individual characters already in existence or yet-to-come, could actually just be a movie, a satisfying entertainment experience unto itself. Guardians didn’t have to pay tribute to every fiefdom in the kingdom as the exhausting Avengers movies are required to do.
Nor is it surprising, in hindsight, that the best superhero movies to come out in the past two decades are Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, a trilogy that could only be excellent by being everything all these other superhero movies, by design, cannot be: the execution of one auteur’s vision. Nolan made a three-movie arc, not three parts of a sprawling, dozen-movie operation. The product was unmistakably Nolan-y, right down to the Hans Zimmer soundtrack.
Will studios like Marvel see Whedon’s unwillingness to stay in the comic coal mines and respond with meaningful change? “No, I do not think they’re going to respond to it in any productive way,” said Silverstein. “I don’t think it has anything to do with gender,” she added. “But I think men get away with a lot more than women do. They get away with more on set.”
Unfortunately, Silverstein said, “ I feel like gender plays a lot in this area. We can’t take away what the overlay of gender could be in terms of how people are treated, on the set, in preproduction.”
What’s next for MacLaren? “I just hope she starts working immediately,” said Silverstein. “What happens is, the women disappear. And I do not want that to happen to her.”
This post originally referred to Wonder Woman as a Marvel property. Wonder Woman is part of DC Comics.
Update:
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Patty Jenkins has closed a deal with Warner Bros. to direct Wonder Woman. The movie is still slotted to premiere in 2017.