Before you get your hopes up, there isn’t a whole lot to Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s recent statement that the studio stable that houses all the DC superheroes needs to hurry up and make a Wonder Woman movie. In a lot of ways, Tsujihara’s insistence that a Wonder Woman project could turn into a major studio franchise is the same vague studio response to increasingly loud discussions about how the superhero genre has largely avoided female protagonists. Then again, apart from some scattered reports about possible Wonder Woman projects, Tsujihara’s statement is all the assurance we have that studios are taking criticism of their phallocentric superhero universes seriously.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tsujihara spoke Saturday at an entertainment law conference, mostly addressing the studio’s most recent gamble, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (which will probably, by the way, end up making somewhere close to $50 million this weekend). Tsujihara was talking about the economics of so-called tentpole movies, which, thanks to recent Disney duds like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, have attracted attention as an increasingly risky business model, which is precisely why Warner Bros. will be looking to make as many Harry Potter spin-offs as the movie-going public can choke down.