“Wonder Woman” fans got an unexpected double dose of action at the beginning of the new sequel.
Speaking with JoBlo, director Patty Jenkins explained why she opened “Wonder Woman 1984” with two opening action scenes: a flashback to the Amazon Olympics, and another at a mall in 1980s Washington, D.C.
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“It was not always written in,” Jenkins said of the Themyscira flashback.
“It was the success of the first film, but it was also something else,” she continued. “I wouldn’t have jammed it in there because of the success of the film, because it actually made the movie too long. We have two openings in our movie and we would talk about it with the studio all the time and they would say, ‘You’ve got to cut the mall and the Eighties, or you’ve got to cut the Amazon.’ I was like, we can’t, we can’t cut either.”
Jenkins went on, “The reason I ended up realizing that you need the Amazon is because… you do that thing where you’re like, wait, you have to remember all the people that haven’t seen the first ‘Wonder Woman’ who watch this on a plane. And suddenly it’s like, oh, it’s super hard to understand who Diana is and what’s going on without touching base there.”
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The director also talked about the importance of the flashback scene to the themes of the film.
“I love the fact that you hear all of the ‘being a great hero takes your whole life,’ you know?” she said. “So there was this wisdom there that they were trying to tell her which is not about being the strongest or the fastest, it’s about these complex observations you have to make during life in order to become a true hero. I love that she doesn’t understand that until that final speech.”
