Joss Whedon talks his failed attempt to direct the Wonder Woman movie

In the end, Joss Whedon did get to direct his big-budget superhero movie and THE AVENGERS will hit theaters next summer. But prior to AVENGERS, Whedon had tried to get another superhero film off the ground and wasn’t nearly as successful.

Back in the mid-2000s, Whedon was hired by Joel Silver and Warner Bros. to be the guy to finally bring a WONDER WOMAN film to the big-screen. Like many attempts prior, it never happened. Whedon would later say it was a “waste of [his] time.” But now that the ship has sailed and Whedon is comfortably embedded with a new franchise (at a new studio), he spoke a bit about his vision.

“She was a little bit like Angelina Jolie [laughs],” explains Whedon. “She sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people.” Why yes, that does sound like Angelina Jolie.

As for the film’s central conflict, Whedon explains, “She would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane. And ultimately her romance with Steve was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.”

It sounds a bit like SUPERMAN RETURNS actually, a film that didn’t exactly do gangbusters for Warners and DC. Silver was notoriously never a fan of Whedon’s approach and even went so far as to bring a new screenwriter on to develop a competing draft while Whedon was still working on his script.

It didn’t work out (and after that failed NBC series, one wonders if it ever will) but perhaps it was all for the best.