Warning: Spoilers for Justice League
-
Warner Bros. has been seeking its footing with the DC Extended Universe for several years now. Originally launched out of the divisive Superman solo film, Man of Steel, a number of fans and critics have called for the films to shift tone, including more humor, a lighter color palate, and smiling heroes. It didn't happen right away, though. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was even more polarizing than its predecessor, introducing a gritty Frank Miller-eque Batman and leaning into the darker tone, bringing the Caped Crusader to blows with the Last Son of Krypton before introducing Doomsday, bringing about Superman's death.
While a number of things were criticized about Batman v Superman, one thing most people seemed to agree upon was that Gal Gadot's debut as Wonder Woman was the best part. This sentiment carried through to her Patty Jenkins directed solo film, which was the DCEU's first major success from both a critical and financial standpoint, leading many fans of the movie to say WB should forget about Batman and Superman and just focus on Wonder Woman, making her the center of this universe moving forward.
Related: Justice League: Snyder Cut Exists In Relevant Form'
After Zack Snyder departed Justice League's production and Joss Whedon stepped in to complete the reshoots, the official word was that he would simply be following the same blueprint as Snyder, but a number of rumors were swirling suggesting Whedon was being far more invasive, that he was brought in to lighten the tone, rewriting and reshooting significant chunks of the film to remove the traditional Zack Snyder trappings, and the reshoots were capitalizing on Wonder Woman's reception to make Diana a bigger focus in the final film.
While most of the rumors about Whedon's involvement ultimately proved to be true, and he had in fact significantly altered the movie from Snyder's original conception, the Wonder Woman role in the movie was mostly the same other than the addition of a romantic subplot with Bruce Wayne, a major missed opportunity on the part of Joss Whedon. Not only should he have made her the central figure in the film, but it would have been easy to accomplish with reshoots, and would have been a much clearer signal to audiences that Justice League learned the right lessons from Wonder Woman's success.
Page 1: (this page): Wonder Woman is the Only Character Audiences Care About
Wonder Woman is the Only DCEU Character Audiences Are 'All In' On
Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is the only DC hero audiences had widely accepted before Justice League. Sure, Henry Cavill's Superman and Ben Affleck's Batman have their followings, but both have also had a number of detractors from day one, and Batman v Superman didn't drastically tip the scales in either's favor.
Wonder Woman is also the only movie in the DCEU that didn't see a divided reaction or any kind of severe backlash. While it was much brighter than Batman v Superman and included more humor, it was still visually impressive and the jokes didn't detract from the gravity of the plot - an issue many fans were concerned would be a side effect of more humor.
Related: How does Warner Bros. Fix Their DC Movies Problem?
While Batman and Superman are classically bigger names, they are the characters carrying the baggage of the previously divisive films in the franchise, so making the story more about Wonder Woman is the perfect way to pivot into a new era without abandoning tones or themes from the previous movies.
When it comes to the new characters, audiences don't know Ezra Miller's Flash, Ray Fisher's Cyborg, or Jason Momoa's Aquaman yet. Sure, they got face time in the marketing campaign and the movie effectively establish a basic origin story for each of them, but none of them have the recognition or the draw that Gal Gadot benefits from after making Wonder Woman the most popular origins story of all time. Since audiences want more of her character and appreciate Wonder Woman's tone more than other DCEU films, then when it comes to drastically altering Justice League to appeal to an audience that disliked Zack Snyder's previous installments, changing it to focus on Wonder Woman's corner of the universe makes sense. And it would have been easy.
Reshoots to Focus on Diana Would Have Been Easy
The version of Justice League that was released in theaters found Batman at the center of most of the plot, but it didn't have to be that way. With Wonder Woman already working closely with him, the reshoots needed only to make her the audience's entry point and the one that decides to assemble the team. All easy to accomplish tasks.
After the opening cell phone video with Superman and the credits montage, the first scene is a Joss Whedon reshoot where Batman captures a parademon for interrogation, but it explodes, painting an image of 3 mother boxes. This scene exists to set up 3 primary functions: First, to establish the Mother Box MacGuffin, second, to establish that parademons smell fear, and third, to establish that a specific siren noise drives them crazy. These are all clearly reshoot elements intended to truncate the plot from something more complicated, and they're only necessary because Batman doesn't possess knowledge that Wonder Woman does.
Related: Justice League Reshoots: Every Change Whedon Made To Snyder's Film
In instead of jumping straight to Batman, the sequence here should have been the scene on Themyscira where Steppenwolf first arrives and Hippolyta launches the flaming arrow to alert Diana. This would make Diana the first one aware of the incident, and since she also knows the story of Steppenwolf's first attack (as she explains to Bruce), it only makes sense for her to go to Gotham to tell him it's time to unite the team. If they decide to stick with the "parademons smell fear" point in order to defeat Steppenwolf in the same way, then she can be the one that explains that.
Now that Diana is the entry point to the story and clearly the one that knows the most about Steppenwolf, what he wants, and what the Mother Boxes are capable of, so she's naturally also in a position of leadership - a role she adopts later in the movie anyway. Add the existing Joss Whedon reshoots where Bruce convinces her to be an icon to humanity as a sort of beacon of hope, and she's also the character with the biggest arc in the movie.
Wonder Woman also has a personal beef with Steppenwolf and vice-versa. He killed many of her Amazon sisters and even taunts her with this knowledge when they face off in the tunnel. Likewise, it was Diana's mother and father that defeated him after his last attack. This personal connection would have added more drama to an already lacking villain story.
The rest is mostly a matter of some minor alternate dialogue and maybe a slight reshoot or insert here and there to simply guide the narrative, but once the movie's opening frames her as the primary protagonist, the rest of the pieces fall into place on their own, not only making a more cohesive story, but a more marketable one.
Wonder Woman Was the Hope the Marketing Was Missing
After Wonder Woman, audiences wanted to know Warner Bros. had learned its lesson for Justice League and beyond. Wonder Woman was already at the forefront of much of the marketing for the team-up, but if the trailers had emphasized a little more of the Themyscira and Amazon connection leading into Diana's choice to approach Bruce about getting a team together, audiences would have seen that Warner Bros. was truly pivoting to focus on the property that saw the biggest reception, instead of thinking they were digging in their heels as the marketing indicated.
The trailers for the version of the movie we got also failed to communicate the movie's plot to general audiences - who typically make up the majority of ticket sales. Sure, fans who know about Steppenwolf and what Mother Boxes are may have had a general idea of how things would go, but most audiences were left in the dark, and without a strong connection to the characters at the center, moviegoers either saw something else or stayed home entirely.
Related: How Justice League Became a Box Office Disaster
With the Wonder Woman-centric version of the movie, the trailers can be free to reveal a lot more of the Amazon opening and Wonder Woman's plot, which all make the "Wonder Woman rounds up the Justice League" version of the movie the trailers could have been very streamlined, showing Steppenwolf's arrival in Themiscira and fight with the Amazons, extending to Hippolyta's message to Diana and her explaining Steppenwolf's previous invasion to Bruce, followed by the team assembly montage.
The big issue with this approach is that the handling of Wonder Woman in the cut we did get didn't inspire much confidence in Joss Whedon's ability to make this a compelling, and his own script for the canceled Wonder Woman project has been criticized for the way it handled the character. The ideal situation would be to have Patty Jenkins complete the changes, but she was unavailable at the time of the reshoots due to Wonder Woman's promotion tour, also calling into question whether or not Gal Gadot herself would have been available for the required work.
Regardless, when it comes to pivoting Justice League into a crowd pleaser, WB's decision to try to bring in Joss Whedon to try and make it resemble an Avengers movie instead of embracing their own homegrown success will always bear some of the blame for why audiences didn't turn out. Who's to know if this direction would have drastically improved Justice League's abysmal opening weekend box office numbers, but the shift to be more like Wonder Woman certainly makes a lot more sense than what they did. That is, assuming it was that necessary to abandon Zack Snyder's vision in the first place.
