Although we’ve had years of updates about Patty Jenkins’ forthcoming Wonder Woman film, somehow we’re just now learning about the people who wrote it. According to /Film, Warner Bros. has issued a press release revealing who contributed to the script—and one of those people is Zack Snyder, director of the divisive Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman.
It’s fair to say that Snyder is unpopular with some fans of superhero cinema after two lugubrious entries in the DC shared universe. (His questionable output has even triggered an overhaul of how Warner Bros. stewards its blockbuster films.) Perhaps today the studio wouldn’t let Snyder tinker with any superhero property except the two Justice League films he’s attached to direct, but the script for Wonder Woman was developed long before people knew that Batman V Superman sucked. You know what they say: hindsight and conveniently ignored X-ray vision are 20/20.
According to Warner Bros.’ press release, “Jenkins directs the film from a screenplay by Allan Heinberg and Geoff Johns, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg, based on characters from DC Entertainment.” We’ve known for a few months that Johns contributed to the script, but, according to i09, Heinberg is a bit of a surprise. He’s known for working on the Young Avengers comic for Marvel, and he also has screenwriting credits on the likes of The O.C. and Gilmore Girls. (He and Johns collaborated previously for a five-issue arc of JLA called “Crisis of Conscience.”) And then there’s Snyder, who is known primarily as a director and only has writing credits for the dual 300 movies and Sucker Punch.
Of course, “story by” credits often don’t have the same influence on the final product as “screenplay by” credits do. After Blade: Trinity, plenty of people were nervous to learn that David Goyer was attached to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, but after Batman Begins, Goyer took on the “story by” role and used his comics expertise to develop stories that Nolan and his brother Jonathan could fashion into their own post-9/11 doomsday parables. Perhaps that’s what will happen here, with Snyder mostly contributing reasons for Wonder Woman to swing her sword a lot because it looks awesome when Wonder Woman swings her sword. Another positive: we’ve already seen Snyder’s take on Wonder Woman, and it’s remarkably inoffensive. So take heart—this could still be good.