Michelle MacLaren to Direct 'Wonder Woman:' Tokenism & Other Thoughts

The lack of opportunities for female directors is such a major problem that when a female director signs on for a major Hollywood blockbuster, it's news. Such is the case for Emmy winning director/producer Michelle MacLaren, who was just announced as director for Wonder Woman (out in June 2017). The film, starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot, is the fourth film in the DC Comics Shared Universe.

Best known for her work on Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, MacLaren is an acclaimed director and many of her fans (myself included) were just waiting for her to be brought into the Hollywood like so many top TV directors. Personally I was hoping she would be handed a potential Black Widow movie starring Scarlett Johansson for Marvel but this news is pretty awesome as well.

A season 3 episode of Game of Thrones, directed by MacLaren

While the news has been received positively, there has been some criticism mainly with the idea that the first time a female director is being brought into helm a major superhero movie is with a female superhero. The implication is this decision from DC Comics and their film distributor Warner Bros. is practicing in tokenism; they're virtually killing two birds with one stone by giving the female superhero movie a female director. MacLaren only got the job because they wanted to tick off 2 boxes on the Underrepresented Minority checklist.

These concerns were not assuaged by the news a while ago that Warner Bros. was specifically seeking a female director for Wonder Woman. It's announcements like that which feed the specter of tokenism hanging over MacLaren's hiring. But unfortunately that's just the world we live in. It's good press for Warner Bros. to hire a woman to direct a major blockbuster just like it was good news for them to officially announce a Wonder Woman movie. I can't tell you whether they were bowing to pressure for a female-led superhero movie/female director or whether Wonder Woman/MacLaren was always going to get greenlit.

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman

Regardless, they are fulfilling a need, satisfying a hunger for more diverse representation on the blockbuster landscape. And luckily for them, MacLaren is a talented, respected director who is more than capable of mounting a terrific blockbuster; let's not forget that male directors with less pedigree have been handed huge franchises.

I'm choosing to be optimistic about MacLaren directing Wonder Woman. If the film is successful, then perhaps it will lead to other female directors getting more opportunities with a wide variety of blockbusters. Unfortunately that's a big if when it comes to DC Comics films. With Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy" being self-contained, the launching point for DC Comics' shared universe is 2013's Man of Steel. That film made money but it had a mediocre reception. Fans had an issue with an unnecessarily dark and brooding Superman movie; it was a film that was borderline humorless and oppressing. While that may have been an intentional aesthetic choice, it still made some fans angry (though perhaps those are the kind of fans who would have been angry regardless).

The issue is that DC Comics and Warner Bros. have been trying to emulate the supposed dark tone of Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy," but their attempts have missed the point. As Scott Mendelson argues, Hollywood learned the wrong lesson with Nolan's Batman movies. Instead of deeply analyzing what made those films so successful, they just took the most superficial reading of the films' tone, "dark and gritty," and said MORE OF THAT!!!! Yes, the "Dark Knight Trilogy" does deal with a darker morality and the stakes are always high. But that is because of the excellent cast and nuanced writing and also because the films do find time to be funny.

It's too early to say what Wonder Woman would look like. It's too early to even be talking about this but I'm not the genius who decided to announce details for films not coming for another few years. Hopefully, MacLaren will be able to make the Wonder Woman movie she wants to make--whatever that would look like. In any case, it is still cause to celebrate that someone of her calibre has the opportunity to take her career in a new direction.

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