After Batman fights Superman and Jared Leto laughs a lot, the next DC movie is Wonder Woman. And unlike 2016's double-whammy of gritty superheroics, nobody knows quite what the film will deal with, probably thanks to the Warner Bros. erratic scripting method, which has been described as "throwing sh*t at a wall and seeing what sticks". However, with shooting set to start in a couple of months, some more concrete details are starting to emerge. The latest rumour says that the movie will be set half in World War I and half in the present day, presumably in the aftermath of Batman V Superman, which slots in nicely with both the rumours of a period movie and the franchise's desire to build its narrative in a Marvel-style. Although the time-jumping does bring with it its own distinct problem in the overarching story. Now I'm obviously the first person to want to throw Man Of Steel in the trash, but doesn't this kinda ruin the intrinsic point of that movie, on which the entire enterprise is built on? That film was billed as the antithesis to The Dark Knight; instead of showing how a superhero would come from the real world, this was how the real world reacted to an actual superhero. The finished product buried this element under lots of destruction porn, but the intent was still there - Superman must hide himself because the world wasn't ready to him. But they are ready, because there was a f*cking Amazonian Warrior blasting about a hundred years earlier. It's the total opposite of what Marvel did with its "part of a bigger universe" at the end of Iron Man. I know Man Of Steel was never intended to be this mega-franchise jumping off point (there's next to no basis for any non-Supes heroes in there) and it was received divisively, but it's important to maintain a sense of continuity through these brazenly interconnected films. Let's not get to Crisis level confusion this early on, shall we? A non-modern day superhero movie is an exciting prospect (Captain America: The First Avenger was the best of Marvel's pre-Avengers efforts) and given that it's the first female superhero flick since these shared universes turned up I want Wonder Woman to succeed, but this is a key thing that the screenwriters need to remember if they really are going to make a go of the DC Extended Universe (is that really what we're calling it now?). Wonder Woman hits cinemas on 23rd June, 2017.
