What if 'Wonder Woman' is terrible, too? Because that seems likely now.
LOS ANGELES -- Fool me once, Man of Steel, fool me twice, Batman v Superman.
Fool me to death, Suicide Squad.
Hey! Who else is looking forward to Wonder Woman? And ... why, exactly, are we doing that?
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There are still otherwise reasonable people holding out hope that Wonder Woman can turn the DC Cinematic Universe around in 2017 -- at least for critics, since these soul-drowning bogs of suckitude, it has been defiantly stated and re-stated, are made "for the fans."
Fans, dutiful automatons ... whatever you call humans who accept icy hot garbage sauce as entertainment, they're still showing up for opening weekend. Sorry "non-fans," but thanks to them, these floggings will continue whether morale improves or not.
And no matter how many times we do this, optimism for the next DC film seems to be the one thing that these movies cannot hastily destroy.
Hey, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman showed up just in time to save Batman and Superman from one another -- maybe Wonder Woman can save this mess at Warner Bros. from being written off entirely?
That's what we all want her to do, anyway.
Right.
Well, like it or not, all eyes now turn to Diana Prince, first superheroine to stand alone in Hollywood's "connected universe" age, whose first female director is putting the Amazon demigod on the big screen for the first time. And though it pains me to say it, all optimism is beginning to look facile and, yes, a little foolish.
Because nope, Wonder Woman probably isn't coming to save us. There is a very good chance that it, too, will be terrible.
Marketing, marketing, marketing
"But Wonder Woman looks great!" we say, and we'd be right. It does look great.
But so did Suicide Squad, setting up "the most disappointing movie of summer, perhaps of all time." So did Batman v Superman, frankly.
Even Man of Steel, which looks increasingly mediocre with time, looked like something special when first served up in small bites four years ago:
Warner Bros.' marketing has been marvelous across this franchise, but it's all sleight of hand. Expensive action shots and one-liners, in the hands of great trailer-makers, make great trailers. They're just not enough to make great movies.
For that, you need a great story.
Which brings us to ...
The writers
The Wonder Woman screenplay was written by two men, Allan Heinberg (pictured below) and Geoff Johns.
Heinberg is a long-established producer and screenwriter of female-skewing TV fare (Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Grey's Anatomy, Scandal), but he's also a noted comic-book writer who found success with "The Young Avengers" and helped re-launch the "Wonder Woman" series after DC's "Infinite Crisis" event. But he's never written a feature film.
He's teamed with Johns (pictured below), president and Chief Creative Officer at DC Comics. Johns' fingerprints are all over everything at DC -- books, movies, TV, the works. Johns was an executive producer on Suicide Squad and BvS, has written and produced a good chunk of the CW's superhero shows Arrow and The Flash and is ostensibly writing the standalone Batman movie.
The Wonder Woman story-crafting structure is a hybrid of how Man of Steel and BvS were respectively written: MoS had David Goyer on screenplay duties with Christopher Nolan helping out on the story; Goyer then tackled BvS, which was punched up by co-screenwriter Chris Terrio (Oscar winner for Argo).
On Wonder Woman, co-writer Heinberg also gets a "story by" credit, which he shares with ... wait for it ... Zack Snyder, who's stepping into the Nolan role here.
Once again, that's a lot of dudes in the kitchen; and we've seen what that can do to the soup. (On the other hand, Suicide Squad was both written and directed by the same person in David Ayer, who had nine feature screenplay credits and directed five films -- three of which he wrote -- by the time he got to Squad. So maybe not auteurism, either.
That's certainly not how things came together for Wonder Woman, for which Warner Bros. wanted a woman at the helm.
And they went with Patty Jenkins.
The director
Jenkins deserves this shot as much as anybody.
Though she only has one feature film to her credit, that film is Monster -- the 2003 story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a role that won the Oscar for Charlize Theron in a movie widely regarded as one of the best of the Aughts.
Jenkins was hired in 2010 to direct Thor: The Dark World -- then was fired months later, reportedly for acting "indecisively" and allegedly putting the project in danger of missing its release date (the other side of the story: Marvel is impossible). That, plus a relative lack of output since her 2003 debut, could be red flags for Wonder Woman (which is by all accounts on schedule for its June 2, 2017 release).
On the bright side, Jenkins did get a peek into the Marvel Studios machinery, where surely she learned a trick or two. And all of the Wonder Woman action sequences we've seen make it clear that if Jenkins' sophomore outing has problems, it won't be in the ass-kicking department.
But here we go again -- saying the movie looks good.
That stubborn company line
Warner Bros./DC staged a major charm offensive this summer after the horrible BvS reception, including an all-expenses-paid film-blogger trip to the London set of Justice League (Mashable attended on its own dime) and an impressive display of unity at Comic-Con.
The apologies were kept to a minimum -- "we heard you, we'll do better" was the extent of concessions at the Pinewood set -- and only smiles and enthusiasm came to San Diego.
But that was before Suicide Squad got skewered. Ever since, there is a troubling air of defiance around it all, a building sense that change for the better is akin to surrender.
Perhaps the biggest concern to date is Jenkins' reaction to Suicide Squad ...
Truly.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story neglected to mention that Allan Heinberg was also a comic-book writer.
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Josh Dickey is Mashable's Entertainment Editor, leading Mashable's TV, music, gaming and sports reporters as well as writing movie features and reviews.Josh has been the Film Editor at Variety, Entertainment Editor at The Associated Press and Managing Editor at TheWrap.com.A finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club's Best Entertainment Feature in 2015 for "Everyone is Altered: The Secret Hollywood Procedure that Fooled Us for Years," Josh received his BA in Journalism from The University of Minnesota.In between screenings, he can be found skating longboards, shredding guitar and wandering the streets of his beloved downtown Los Angeles.
