When revealing how close she actually came to ditching the sequel project over equity demands, the 'Wonder Woman' director stresses her career had never been about making money.

• Dec 21, 2020

AceShowbiz - Filmmaker Patty Jenkins had "started to walk away" from "Wonder Woman 1984" before Warner Bros. studio bosses finally agreed to bow to her pay equity demands.

Jenkins was highly praised by movie critics and fans alike after teaming up with actress Gal Gadot for Wonder Woman's first solo blockbuster in 2017, when it banked more than $821 million (£607 million) at the global box office.

However, it took some time before Warner Bros. chiefs announced the director would be returning to take charge of the follow-up, "Wonder Woman 1984", amid reports suggesting Jenkins was leveraging her position to land a better deal.

Now she has opened up about how close she actually came to cutting ties with the DC Comics project altogether, simply because she was determined to stand up for herself and demand the same pay as male filmmakers receive for superhero blockbusters.

In a candid interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, she confessed, "I started to walk away. I was gonna walk away. I even said I'd be happy to go to another studio and make a quarter as much because it's not a sequel, on principle, no problem."

Jenkins admits her career had never been about making money, because she never had the leverage, but this time around, she knew it was "time to turn the tables," especially as it was easy to find out how much her male counterparts were making for the same kind of work.

"They got paid seven times more than me for (their) first superhero movie," she explained. "Then on the second one, they got paid more than me still. It was an easy fight to say, 'This can't be. It super can't be. And it really can't be on Wonder Woman...' "

"It was an interesting thing to do, but it was an easy thing to do in the fact I was dead serious. That I was like, 'If I can't be victorious in this regard, then I'm letting everyone down.' If not me, who? So it became something I became very, very, very passionate about."

Now Jenkins is looking to the future after the launch of "Wonder Woman 1984", which hits U.S. audiences on Christmas Day (December 25), and she's unsure if she will be back for Wonder Woman 3.

She and screenwriter and comic book author Geoff Johns have already outlined a plot for the next instalment in the DC Extended Universe franchise, but whether Jenkins will be back in the director's chair remains to be seen - and it all depends on the status of the movie industry once the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

"It's interesting, I actually came up with a story, and Geoff Johns and I beat out an entire story for 'Wonder Woman 3' that we were super fired up about, but I've never felt this way before as much as I do now," she mused.

"I don't think I'm doing it next," she continued, "and so I have to sort of wait and see where we are in the world, you know? What I wanted to talk about in (WW84) was very prescient to what I was feeling and what you were sort of feeling was coming. So now I'm not sure. So much has changed in the world."