Patty Jenkins slams Joss Whedon's Justice League: "I don’t recognize half of these characters"
After years of smiling and making-nice, the dam surrounding Joss Whedon’s version of 2017's Justice League appears to be well-and-truly ready to break. Today, Cinema Blend reports on a podcast appearance recently made by Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984 writer/director Patty Jenkins, expressing her discontent with Whedon’s version of the film: “I think that all of us DC directors tossed that out just as much as the fans did,” Jenkins told the ReelBlend podcast. “But also, I felt that that version contradicted my first movie in many ways, and this current movie, which I was already in production on.”
For those feeling a little fuzzy on the timeline, Jenkins’ first Wonder Woman was the second cinematic appearance of Gal Gadot’s Diana, after she was introduced in Zack Snyder’s 2016 Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice. The largely standalone Wonder Woman (2017) went on to be both a major critical and commercial hit for Warner Bros., nearly matching Dawn’s box office performance on roughly half its budget—before being followed by the more expensive, less successful Justice League, which Whedon took over after Snyder was forced to depart the project after the death of his daughter.
Whedon’s film was mostly met with shrugs at the time, but has come under increasing ire in the last three years: From fans, who demanded (ultimately successfully) that the not-actually extant “Snyder Cut” be restored. From Snyder himself, who said he’d rather “blow that fucking thing up” than use a second of Whedon’s footage. From actor Ray Fisher, who alleged that Whedon was abusive on the movie’s set. And now from Jenkins, who gave the film a cold appraisal of the changes to its tone that Whedon attempted to implement:
The only thing I have done, and have always tried to do, is — I knew, when Zack was doing Justice League, where she sort of ends up. So I always tried… like, I didn’t change her suit, because I never want to… I don’t want to contradict his films, you know? But yet, I have to have my own films, and he’s been very supportive of that. And so, I think that that Justice League was kind of an outlier. They were trying to turn one thing into, kind of, another. And so then it becomes, ‘I don’t recognize half of these characters. I’m not sure what’s going on.’
Whedon has been extremely quiet over the increasingly loud backlash over the film—the last he’s made to date. Meanwhile, Snyder’s version of the movie is set to be released in four installments on HBO Max in 2021.