"It was a great cast," Palicki enthuses now. Kelley's hitmaker pedigree attracted other A-list talent to the pilot as well: Cary Elwes, Tracie Thoms and Pedro Pascal were all cast as Wonder Woman's various allies while Elizabeth Hurley played her nemesis, Veronica Cale, and prolific TV director, Jeffrey Reiner, orchestrated the action behind the camera. 2011, just after wrapping the series finale of Friday Night Lights. After a high-profile casting search, Palicki scored the starring role in Feb. The studio announced Kelley's hiring in 2010, and granted the Ally McBeal creator carte blanche in creating his own take on Diana's past and future. decided to bypass theaters for television, where Smallville had already given a second life to Superman. (He and Smulders ended up getting their superhero game on in Marvel's industry-altering The Avengers in 2012.)Īfter Whedon's departure, Wonder Woman languished in development hell until Warner Bros.
"I had a take on the film that nobody liked," he admitted about the circumstances surrounding his exit. The following year, Whedon announced on his blog that he and the studio parted ways. He also included a scene where her love interest, Steve Trevor, mansplains what it means to be a hero - as if she needed that advice. Part of the issue was that Whedon took the "vulnerability" he saw in the character too much to heart: His narrative featured her losing two key battles, one of which leaves her completely powerless. or for the fans who discovered the script after it leaked onto the internet. 2006, Whedon delivered his draft of the screenplay to the studio, but it didn’t click for them.
Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman in the classic '70s TV series. We were just a year too early." (Watch our video interview above.) "A year later is when Marvel and DC blew up, especially on television. "I think we just missed the mark honestly," Palicki tells Yahoo Entertainment now. (Although it never aired on NBC, you can find the full 40-minute Wonder Woman via various online sources, including the Internet Archive.) Instead, the pilot wound up being a fascinating Elseworlds one-shot for what a different version of the DC TV universe might have looked like. It was also poised to be the title character's first live action incarnation since Lynda Carter's much-loved '70s TV series, and followed years of failed attempts to bring the character - who made her comic book debut in 1941 - to the big screen. Had it gone forward, Wonder Woman would have been DC's most high-profile primetime superhero drama since The Flash and Lois & Clark nearly two decades earlier. The show arrived at a crucial pivot point for DC's television ambitions: Smallville had just finished its 10-year run on The CW (formerly The WB) and Arrow was still a year away from launching the youth-oriented network's ongoing Arrowverse. In 2011, Friday Night Lights star Adrianne Palicki played the Amazonian warrior in a never-aired pilot for an NBC TV series overseen by superstar producer David E. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the DC Comics hero nearly had another live action origin story. But before Gadot assumed the mantle of Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder's 2016 universe-expanding team-up, Batman v. As comic book fans descend on Southern California this year for the return of San Diego Comic-Con, the stage might be set for announcing the future of the Wonder Woman film franchise, with star Gal Gadot and director Patti Jenkins reuniting to close out the trilogy that started with their 2017 blockbuster.