“I hope we can keep it in this room,†Patty Jenkins told the thousands of superfans that filled San Diego Comic-Con’s cavernous Hall H. She was about to show off some very early footage from her eagerly anticipated sequel Wonder Woman 1984 … so early, in fact, that the movie still has 20 more weeks of shooting still to come.
Will those fans keep their covenant with Jenkins? We’ll soon find out, but in the meantime, Vulture can tell you what we spied from the new film, which throws Gal Gadot’s superheroine into the 1980s, brings back Chris Pine, and introduces a new foe in Kristen Wiig’s Cheetah.
The latter two actors didn’t appear in the clip we were shown, a fun action sequence that featured Gadot’s Wonder Woman fending off gunmen in a very 80’s-looking mall food court. (If you’ve been paying attention, it’s the same one we saw a confused Pine wandering around in his first still from the film.) As she strides toward the evildoers, Wonder Woman catches the attention of a grinning little girl, and her priority immediately becomes protection. “Hold tight,†says our heroine as she picks up the girl and super-hurls her away, sliding the kid across the food-court floor. Don’t worry: The girl giggles the entire time, loving the ride, and crashes safely into some plush teddy bears.
After that, Wonder Woman focuses her attention on the bad guys and quickly disarms them, crushing their guns with her super-strength. As a final flourish, she whips out her lasso and entangles both men with it, then pulls a move straight out of Atomic Blonde by using their weight as ballast to leap off the top floor of the mall and land three stories down below. It’s a sequence with pep and pop that feels like something Lynda Carter would love, and it was followed by an unrelated shot of Wonder Woman running at super-speed through a city street, so fast that the passersby might as well be standing in place.
Jenkins couldn’t tell us much else, though she teased the mystery resurrection of Pine’s character and explained why the movie is set in 1984: “It was mankind at its best … and worst. It’s us at our most extreme.â€
Can this sequel live up to the original movie, which became a critical and box-office phenomenon? “The bar is very, very high, but our aspirations are even higher,†Gadot said.
“I never want to do more of anything for the wrong reason,†Jenkins added. “I don’t even want to go to that place in my head of how you keep it going and cash in. I want to make great movies in my lifetime … we can make a whole new movie about something completely new, and as unique in its own right as the first one.â€