Patty Jenkins says there’s a "million movies to be told" using superheroes.
The 45-year-old American director-and-screenwriter helmed the upcoming ‘Wonder Woman’ film – the latest release in the DC Extended Universe – with Gal Gadot reprising her role as the titular character for the second time following her first outing in ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’.
It’s the first female-led superhero film fans have been given and although the cinemas are awash with films based on DC Comics and Marvel characters, Jenkins thinks there are still many more stories to explore with the various rich characters.
Speaking during a Q&A session at Anaheim WonderCon 2017, she said: "There’s a million movies to be told with [these] common characters. That’s the great thing about the diversity of superheroes, and one of the reasons why when people say, ‘Is the superhero thing gonna die?’ or whatever, I always think it’s so much bigger than that."
DC films – made in conjunction with Warner Bros. Pictures – that have been big box office success include ‘The Dark Knight’ trilogy, starring Christian Bale as Batman, and more recently ‘Suicide Squad’, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe includes hits such as the three ‘Iron Man’ films, the two ‘Avengers’ movies and ‘Ant-Man’.
Jenkins, 45, believes the superhero stories in the pages of comics and on the screen are as important to modern culture as the Greek and Roman myths and are useful characters to explore the nature of morality.
She explained: "It’s not about superheroes. It’s about the method of universal storytelling that all people have that is not of one religion, one thing, that America ended up inventing as a way to tell these metaphors about all different kinds of states of being. So to me, they’re the same as the Greek myth, they’re the same as the Roman myth, or religious figures of every religion."
She continued: "These are our common characters that we use to express stories about being a better person, or what you would do if you were faced with various things. So for me, that’s an incredibly powerful thing."
‘Wonder Woman’ – also starring Chris Pine, David Thewlis and Robin Wright – hits cinemas in June.
Patty Jenkins: There’s still a million superhero stories to be told
