Wonder Woman: No Man's Land Scene Almost Cut

It looks like one of the best scenes in Wonder Woman was almost cut from the film at one point. After proving herself for 75 years as one of the most beloved and iconic comic book characters of all time, Diana Prince has finally gotten the solo live-action feature film that she deserves. Following her brief introduction in last year's Batman v Superman, the film follows Gal Gadot's Diana as she ventures out of her secluded Amazonian island of Themyscira, into the world of man, in the hopes of ending the first World War before more lives are inexplicably lost.

Accompanying Diana along her journey is Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), the fighter pilot who informed her of the war in the first place, and who Diana forges a deep connection with throughout the film. Despite the divisive reactions that both Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad received last year, Wonder Woman has become one of the highest-rated superhero films of all time, hopefully marking a turning point in critical reception for the DC Extended Universe. However, director Patty Jenkins had to make sure that one of Wonder Woman's most praised sequences actually made it into the film itself.

While recently speaking with Fandango, Jenkins revealed that Warner Bros. and some of the film's other key creative team members were hesitant to include the film's now-famous No Man's Land scene, which Jenkins reveals is actually her favorite moment in the movie:

“It’s my favorite scene in the movie and it's the most important scene in the movie. It’s also the scene that made the least sense to other people going in, which is why it's a wonderful victory for me.

I think that in superhero movies, they fight other people, they fight villains. So when I started to really hunker in on the significance of No Man's Land, there were a couple people who were deeply confused, wondering, like, ‘Well, what is she going to do? How many bullets can she fight?’ And I kept saying, ‘It's not about that. This is a different scene than that. This is a scene about her becoming Wonder Woman.’”

Of course, as fans are well aware at this point, the No Man's Land sequence in question - which focuses on Diana as she begins marching courageously across a stretch of land open to machine gun fire from the German forces - did make it into the film. And apparently, that was because Jenkins went out of her way to prove its merit to the naysayers, by storyboarding the sequence herself in order to fully sell the visual nature of the scene.

Indeed, Jenkins isn't wrong to have fought for the sequence either, with a majority of both critics and fans calling it the best scene in the movie, and some even going so far as to call it one of the best scenes in comic book movie history. It's the first time that Gadot's Diana really experiences and sees the violence of war up close and personal for herself, as she tries to just make it through No Man's Land to save a town of innocent civilians, who are being occupied by armed forces, on the other side. Because of the way that Jenkins shoots the scene and the way it's built up to throughout the film, it marks not only a major turning point for the movie thematically, but emotionally for Diana as a character, and arguably, the entire DCEU.