By Travis Johnson
A weird bit of news broke today that wasn’t exactly news, but more a sudden apprehension of a fact that everyone knew but didn’t grasp the full significance of: with a reported budget of $150 million, DC/Warner’s upcoming Wonder Woman will be the first film directed by a woman with a budget north of $100 million.
Given that tentpole budgets are generally well over the $100M mark, it seems strange that director Patty Jenkins is the first female helmer to take the reins on a project that big, but it’s true. It’s also quite a jump up; Jenkins’ last theatrical release, 2004’s Monster, was budgeted at $8 million. The last female director who had a comparable budget was genre mainstay Kathryn Bigelow; not for Zero Dark Thirty, which cost a mere $40 million, but for underperforming 2002 submarine drama K-19: The Widowmaker, which had a reported cost of bang on $100M. Looking back further than that, we arrive at Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, which had a reported budget of $80M – in 1998. As of May 8, the movie is old enough to vote.
While it’s fitting in a way that Wonder Woman is already smashing through glass ceilings and breaking records and Jenkins – who was courted for Thor: The Dark World before ultimately losing the job to TV director Alan Taylor – deserves all the props in the world, the fact that this record is only being broken now serves to highlight gender representation issues behind the camera as well as in front of it. On the superhero front, while both Marvel and DC Warner have been quite vocal about representation in their films, with DC winning the race to get a female-led movie out first, and Marvel pencilling in a Captain Marvel film for 2019, surely a big budget, Bigelow-directed Black Widow movie isn’t too much to ask? The market and the talent is right there for the asking.
Arguably the watchowskis (sp?) might qualify though it’s an edge case being that I *think* Jupiter was made while lily was still identifying as Andy I *think* so I’m not sure it fully counts