It appears likely that The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones' Michelle MacLaren will be directing Wonder Woman. That makes perfect sense.
Yesterday came very reliable reports that Michelle MacLaren is deep in negotiations with Warner Bros. to take up the director’s chair for DC’s first solo movie in our post Dawn of Justice world: Wonder Woman.
Considering that MacLaren has not directed a single theatrically released film in the past, it has left some fans understandably uneasy. But the rest of her resume fills in a lot of the gaps about why WB thinks she is a solid choice for bringing Wonder Woman to the screen, as well as how perhaps WB (and thereby DC) are coming around to the Marvel way of doing things.
What MacLaren lacks in film credits she makes up with in serious television bonafides. As one of the go-to women directors of coveted premium cable dramas, MacLaren has leant her eye to any number of quality shows that include Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, The Leftovers, and even next year’s highly anticipated Better Call Saul. With credits dating back to a one-episode stint on The X-Files, MacLaren obviously made an impression on Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan since he hired her more than any other director to lens the series—she oversaw a total of 11 episodes—and she soon became an executive producer on the show, and an Emmy winning executive producer, at that.
MacLaren has made little in the way of films, but she has a perfect eye for quality, addictive television. This is very likely what WB and DC currently covets in its new strategy.
Not so long ago, the studio had attempted to differentiate itself from its competitors. Rather than building an entire universe, WB was for a time content with allowing “visionaries” to enjoy the artistic integrity that came with one film at a time, and realizing their own creative tendencies. While this led to the nominal dud that was Superman Returns, it certainly paid off in dividends (about $2.5 billion of them to be exact) with Christopher Nolan and his The Dark Knight Trilogy. Indeed, while Marvel Studios geared up for the first trickling of its shared cinematic universe in 2008, WB dressed to the nines for awards season where The Dark Knight swept the Best Supporting Actor category (and whose onerous snubbing at the Academy Awards for Best Picture caused that category to expand to 10 slots the next year).
However, WB was so indebted and grateful for that vision that when Nolan decided to end his Batman series in a way that they could never make any more sequels to it, the studio calmly went along to box office glory—and then back to square one the same year that Marvel/Disney crossed $1.5 billion in The Avengers, with nary an end in sight.
When WB finally began building its own shared universe, they hired one of their favorite PR-labeled “visionaries,” Mr. Zack Snyder. He promised that Man of Steel would feed into the “Biblical” aspirations of Superman and DC iconography, explaining that“it’s not just a romp.” Marvel in the meantime hired Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor to helm Thor: The Dark World and the surprising (and ultimately fantastic) choice of the Russo brothers to lead the way on Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
At least one of those two television gambles by Marvel Studios paid off, and the Russos currently appear to be the heirs apparent for The Avengers throne. Also, perhaps not so coincidentally, Marvel Studios parted way with one of its few true auteurs, Edgar Wright, who was hired onto Ant-Man at a time in 2007 when Nolans and Raimis were still making superhero movies. He was replaced with Peyton Reed who enjoys notable comedy credits (Bring It On, Down with Love), but most recently has been helming episodes of New Girl and The Goodwin Games.
Likewise now WB has seemingly swung around to the expansive universality of franchise-building in the 21st century. To compete in the superhero market, one no longer needs to be worrying about making the best film possible, but about making the best five films one can possibly be making simultaneously, with each feeding into the next as free advertising—like a marketing uroboros.
Subsequently, studios need to be less worried about making a masterful trilogy from a true artist than in creating a streamlined and well-oiled machine that cranks out the assembly line movies with the speed of, well, television.
This is not a knock on any of the television directors that superhero cinema is now raising up, as the Russos have proven that they are worth more than You, Me and Dupree (which any Community fan already knew). And as DC has released its staggering film slateuntil 2020, that sort of synergetic narrative mindset becomes mandatory. If television is the future of superhero movies, then MacLaren has already proven she is one of the best voices in the field.
MacLaren directed "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" of Game of Thrones, which featured Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) deconstructing gender stereotypes as a woman more comfortable in a plate of armor than a dress—so when she is demoralized by her captors and forced to wear a flowing pink gown while fighting a bear, she looks absolutely terrified...to be caught in pink. Such, progressive femininity would certainly be valuable for a Wonder Woman movie that showcases the strength of the feminine without standing on cliché or pure objectification.
Conversely, for the most breathlessly adolescent male fans, she also helmed the "Second Sons" episode of Game of Thrones, which glorified every square inch of Emilia Clarke's body with an extreme close-up pan and the kind of idolatry that would make Michael Bay slack-jawed. So, fanboys need not worry about the male gaze being tempered.
In short, she proved with her work in Game of Thrones that she can walk the paradoxical line between strong, brilliantly written women (say, Daenerys Stormborn Targaryan, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, and Khaleesi of the Dothraki Sea) and pure fanboy titillation. That sounds pretty much like Wonder Woman to me.
Plus, by the time Wonder Woman has its June 23, 2017 release date, MacLaren could already be onto the next Wonder Woman movie in the pipeline…
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