Patty Jenkins knew she would be blamed for ‘Thor 2’ failure if she stayed

With “Wonder Woman 1984”, Patty Jenkins has just marked the biggest opening weekend of all films since the reopening of theaters. As a victory lap, she took to the WTF podcast with Marc Maron to talk about her journey to making blockbuster superhero movies, which many outside observers didn’t think was likely after her indie drama of 2003 “Monster”. A crucial pit stop along the way was her brief stint at the helm of “Thor 2”, which eventually became the much-maligned “Thor: The Dark World” in 2013. She left that project, to be replaced by “Game of Thrones” director Alan Taylor, but Jenkins hasn’t commented much in the past on exactly why she did.

“It was said that I wanted to do a superhero movie and to Marvel’s credit – on a movie that didn’t require a woman at all – they hired me,” Jenkins said. “So, I have always been very grateful to them even if it didn’t work. They wanted to make a story that I thought wasn’t going to succeed, and I knew it couldn’t be me. It couldn’t have been me who had done this. If they hired a guy to do it it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t make a good movie with the story they wanted to make.

Jenkins therefore moved away from the project, even though directing “Thor 2” would have made her the first filmmaker to direct a big-budget superhero movie. The implication here is that directing a high-profile comic book dud would have derailed her chances of running other hit tents, which wouldn’t be as likely to happen if she was a man. Given the industry’s double standard, Jenkins felt that she had to navigate the blockbuster world of blockbuster almost flawlessly to achieve and maintain a level of success. And also achieve her true goal: to achieve “Wonder Woman”, which she reported to Warner Bros. which she wanted to do immediately after the success of “Monster” in 2003.

“I wanted to come in,” she said to Maron. “I wanted to make a great superhero movie after ‘Monster’. And I started saying that right after “Monster”. People were confused… I had all the “women” films, all the stories about women. And I was like, ‘I want to make movies about women but I don’t want to make movies about being a woman is so boring. I want to make movies about women doing all kinds of things. “

Someone once told her that she could be like a Woody Allen woman, but that wasn’t what Jenkins really wanted. “I wanted to have a chance on the big emotions.”

After her first meeting with Warner Bros about “Wonder Woman” in 2004, Jenkins met with the studio about once every two years thereafter, during which she suggested that 30 scripts were commissioned for the film. The studio “didn’t know what to do with Wonder Woman” and “was scared of the previous failed female superhero movies,” she said, and even walked away when they insisted. a direction for history that it does not have. want to be part of. It was then that she went to Marvel Studios.

Jenkins’ journey to making superhero films, however, began much earlier. On the podcast, she cited Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” as a formative experience for her when she was seven, her fighter pilot father having recently been killed.

“I was deeply shaken by this movie and then the release when he becomes a superhero,” she said. “I’ve always had an appreciation for the – not all tentpoles – for some archetypal, massive films that can affect an audience in this way. It occupied an important place in my subconscious.

Jenkins touched on her father’s career as a fighter pilot in a teaser produced by Lucasfilm for his upcoming film, “Star Wars: Rogue Squadron” from 2023. She is also attached to “Wonder Woman 3”.

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