It's a fact that DC Comics buffs will be forced to accept, and one that will forever haunt Warner Bros.: before Joss Whedon signed on the dotted line with Marvel and made The Avengers (2012) a household name (and billion-dollar property), he tried to make a Wonder Woman movie.

Warner Bros. ultimately turned him down, and the rest is history. But even if six years and unrivaled success have softened the blow for the writer/director, Whedon recently admitted that there was a time when he himself succumbed to the desire to rub his success in the faces of those who doubted him and Wonder Woman's potential.

When asked by Crave Online if the writer/director of one of the biggest superhero movies of all time ever feels like rubbing it in to the studio that turned him away, Whedon admitted that he still has a sore spot over not being able to do Diana justice on the big screen, at least when he first proved the skeptics wrong:

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"Early on. It's like grief: there's a period of anger where you're like 'hey, remember all those times when I told you it would've worked? THEY believed me, and it did! So now I'm going to get angry about stuff that I had pretty much dealt with.'

"So yeah, you do sort of want to have a 'slap line' of everybody you've ever worked for. But I've been luckier than most people so you get over that."

It's important to remember that hindsight is 20/20 - and even some fans of Whedon's small screen work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and the feature film Serenity (2005) feared The Avengers would prove too large a task (at least for mass audiences, beyond Whedon's core fan base). He had a history of writing strong female characters from the very beginning, but even today, it's hard to see Whedon's vision fitting with that of Warner Bros., if Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder's style is what the studio is looking for.

Before anyone takes Whedon's sense of humor as general resentment towards WB, it's worth re-reading his open letter to fans promoting every superhero movie, not just his own, or those now under his supervision. And given that his interest in female superheroes of any kind, we'd be willing to bet that the director would simply like to see Wonder Woman done justice on film, no matter who ends up with the task of doing it.

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Any director, regardless of success, will always wish they'd had a chance to bring a project to fruition - just look at the many directors who tried to reboot Superman prior to Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. Unfortunately, fans can only wonder what might have been if Whedon had landed the job, succeeded, and adopted a similar role with Warner Bros. For what it's worth, Whedon himself isn't dwelling on it; he's got more than enough Marvel biz to worry about.

How do you feel about the Wonder Woman movie that almost was? Think it could have worked as well as The Avengers, or would the film have been more challenging than an action-packed team-up? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments.

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Follow Andrew on Twitter @andrew_dyce.

Source: Crave Online