14 DAY TRIAL // This is the announcement fans have dying to hear for years: Wonder Woman is coming back to the screen. David E. Kelley is confirmed to write and produce a new television series around the adventures of the beloved heroine.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision has all the details of the upcoming project, underlining that it will probably also mark the end of all efforts of making a Wonder Woman film feature happen.
“Wonder Woman is heading back to the screen but instead of flying to movie theatres, the Amazon princess is returning to television,” Heat Vision writes.
“Warner Bros. Television is developing a modern-day reboot of the classic DC comic book heroine and is lassoing an unlikely talent to potentially write and produce the superhero project: David E. Kelley, the showrunner behind legal dramas such as ‘Ally McBeal,’ ‘Boston Legal’ and ‘The Practice’,” the same e-zine says.
As we also informed you a while back, at one point, Joss Whedon was attached to the Wonder Woman feature film, but he eventually dropped out after trying for too long to come up with a version that would please the movie studio.
The announcement for the film with Whedon in charge came in 2005. In 2009, he was already out of the project and talking to the media about how a Wonder Woman film would never fly, literally.
That may be the case – but it seems odds are looking better for a television series. However, that’s not to say development on it will go smoothly, Heat Vision warns.
“Though the 1975-79 TV series starring Lynda Carter remains the most memorable version of the character in pop culture, major networks have struggled to make female-driven action series work beyond superhero shows work beyond NBC’s ‘Heroes’,” the e-zine says.
“One short-lived title, NBC’s ‘Bionic Woman,’ which was likewise best known for its 1970s TV version, and could haunt attempts to get a series launch,” Heat Vision believes.
Still, this doesn’t change the fact that Wonder Woman is made for TV and not the big screen, the aforementioned publication says.
Other similar projects, which bombed at the box office (“Elektra” would be one) stand as proof of that, while series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (which was also a movie first) fared extraordinarily well on TV.