Wonder Twins powers, activate! Shape of: An HBO Max original movie!
The most intermittently useless members of the Super Friends are getting their own movie
Sorry to anyone who has a favorite DC superhero who hasn’t shown up in the movies yet: The Wonder Twins beat them to it. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has hired Adam Sztykiel (a writer on Rampage, Scoob!, and Black Adam) to write and direct a live-action HBO Max original movie about Jayna and Zan, the Osmond-like twin superheroes who debuted in The All-New Super Friends Hour back in the ‘70s.
THR doesn’t know much of anything about what Warner Bros. is planning for this project, but we can guess from Sztykiel’s CV that it’s probably going to skew more in the direction of “comedy” than some other movies about DC superheroes. But we don’t know, because this will also be Sztykiel’s directorial debut, so maybe he cut his teeth writing Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Road Chip and Undateable just so he could someday make an edgelord Wonder Twins movie.
If that is his plan, it could be difficult to pull off. For those who missed out on Super Friends, or the years when Cartoon Network was so desperate for programming that it would regularly re-air Super Friends, the Wonder Twins were sort of lighthearted audience-surrogate characters meant to be more fun than Batman and Wonder Woman and… Apache Chief.
Unfortunately, any potential fun was often held back by the duo’s power set: After fist-bumping and saying “Wonder Twin powers, activate!” the two could change into different forms, with Jayna being able to turn into animals and Zan turning into some form of water—including “water in a bucket,” “a patch of ice,” and that’s it. Neither could really do anything without the other, but also Zan couldn’t really do anything anyway.
The Wonder Twins have since been integrated into the main comic book continuity, often with attempts to ironically make them badass, but jumping straight to that might be weird for this movie. They also previously showed up on Smallville, and their pet monkey made a cameo during one of the Arrowverse crossovers.