In just 17 days, Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman has bagged $573.5 million at the worldwide box office, which beats the lifetime gross of Sam Taylor-Johnson's Fifty Shades of Grey ($571 million). Some say the movie has enough legs to conveniently walk past the total gross for Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma Mia! ($609.84 million) and Jennifer Yuh's Kung Fu Panda 2 ($665.7 million) to become the highest-grossing female-directed movie of all time.
Normally, this type of success would ensure that the director would return for the sequel. But Taylor-Johnson, Lloyd, and Yuh were all replaced for their respective sequels, so many were worried by the report that said that Jenkins hadn’t yet signed on for Wonder Woman 2.
Jenkins expressed her desire to return for Diana Prince's second standalone movie a number of times, and even claimed that the story will take place in the U.S. Now we can understand how she could be so sure, since DC Films co-head Geoff Johns recently told Variety that he and Jenkins have already started working on the sequel's script:
Patty and I are writing the treatment right now. The goal is to make another great Wonder Woman film. I had a blast making it with Patty the first time. We've got a cool idea for the second one.
During the interview, Johns said that they were committed to making more female-driven DC Extended Universe movies:
We've got a lot of plans for our female characters, just because they're great characters. There are many wonderful elements to the DC Universe, and one of them is that we have the best female characters, heroes, and villains in the world. No one is going to beat Wonder Woman and Batgirl and Harley Quinn.
Joss Whedon, who directed the first two Avengers movies for Marvel Studios, is set to write and direct a standalone Batgirl movie. In addition, Zack Snyder put Whedon in charge of Justice League after a family tragedy forced Snyder to pull out of the project. When asked about Whedon’s importance within the DCEU, DC Films co-president Jon Berg responded:
He's a big part already. We love him. He's a great partner, collaborator; we want him to be ensconced. We bring people by, have general meetings, and talk about comics and their favorite superhero movies. With Joss, he saw the master board, and he saw a Batgirl title and he said, "You guys seriously want to do Batgirl?" And we said, "Absolutely." He said, "That's my jam."
