Rumored Wonder Woman 1984 Plot Details Have Leaked
The current cut of Wonder Woman 1984 might be anything but wonderful.
The website Cosmic Book News is reporting that one of its sources caught a test screening of the film, and that as it stands, it's shaping up to be a complete disaster. If the report is accurate, it'll be no simple fix, because the problems are systemic — specifically, the flick's story sounds patently ludicrous.
Before we dive in, we must make one thing clear: Cosmic Book News is not typically a reliable source for inside information. The website has a less-than-sterling track record with their rumor reports; you may get the idea that we're being charitable here, and you would be correct. Having said that, it's within the realm of possibility that the site does indeed have a source that attended a test screening of Wonder Woman 1984, and that said source was relaying accurate info. If both of those things turn out to be true, then hoo boy — this movie is in trouble.
According to our alleged test screening attendee, the entire movie centers on some kind of "magic rock" that grants reality-warping powers to its main antagonist, Max Lord (Pedro Pascal). Lord uses his powers to grant wishes to (apparently random) people, but each wish has a twofold effect: it brings unintended consequences for the wish maker (call it the "Monkey's Paw Effect"), and it causes Lord's vaguely-defined power to increase in unspecified ways.
Our hero, Diana of Themyscira (Gal Gadot), is the unwitting recipient of one of these wishes, and she accidentally uses it to bring back her lost love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), who heroically sacrificed himself at the conclusion of 2017's Wonder Woman. Unfortunately, Trevor's consciousness is ported over into the body of some random dude, with only Diana able to see him for who he is; in addition, using the wish inexplicably causes Diana to lose some of her powers (but not all of them, for some reason).
The flick's secondary antagonist, Barbara Minerva AKA Cheetah (Kristen Wiig), is likewise granted her powers through the magic of Max Lord's rock. Once Diana (somehow) deduces that Lord is the one causing all of the weird-ass trouble, she sets out to take him down — opposed by Cheetah, who doesn't want to lose her newfound powers.
At some point, Diana and Trevor are forced to steal a jet airplane, and here's where everything could truly go off the rails. According to Cosmic Book News' source, Diana — using some innate, previously unseen power — turns the jet invisible in an egregiously shoehorned-in reference to Wondy's famous mode of transportation from the comics.
Eventually, the pair figure out Lord's master plan: to commandeer a satellite which will somehow enable him to grant a wish to everyone on Earth, thereby ratcheting up his power (whatever that is) to crazy levels. After a climactic fight during which Diana prevails, Lord realizes the error of his ways, and makes one final wish: that he had never come across the magic rock in the first place. Everything is restored to normal, and it's basically as if the entire movie never took place.
For one final insult, the flick's last scene has Diana agreeing to let the random dude formerly possessed with the spirit of Trevor — now just, well, some random dude — take her out for a date. Roll credits!
Is the leaked plot of Wonder Woman 1984 accurate?
First of all, it should be noted that we have absolutely no way of knowing virtually any of Wonder Woman 1984's plot details at this point. We've seen a variety of stills from the picture, but they tell us practically nothing; we have no trailer, no word from director Patty Jenkins or scribes Dave Callaham and Geoff Johns, nada. This entire synopsis could have been spun out of whole cloth, and we'd be none the wiser.
That being the case, all we really have to go on in the work that Jenkins and company did on Wonder Woman, which is (in our humble opinion) hands down the best film in the DC Movie Universe. (In case you're about to leap out of your seat with righteous indignation, we're not counting Joker here, as it's completely unconnected to the previous films in the franchise.)
Wonder Woman told a tight, compelling story with heart, humor, and plenty of kickass action; it felt quite a bit like a Phase 1 Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, and we mean that in the best possible way. For Jenkins to careen wildly from that to the utter mess that we described above doesn't seem terribly likely, although we suppose that much stranger things have happened in Hollywood.
Having quite literally nothing else to go on, the question of whether the leak is accurate largely comes down to what our gut tells us, and our gut tells us that, once again, Cosmic Book News (or, if we're giving the site the benefit of the doubt, its source) is full of it. We simply can't believe that a filmmaking team with the combined talent of Jenkins, Johns, and Callaham would allow the sequel to such an excellent film as Wonder Woman to stray this far into Bonkersville.
Fortunately, we'll be able to assess the supposed leak from a much more informed viewpoint in less than a month. The first trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 will drop on December 8 at Comic-Con Experience in São Paulo, Brazil, and it'll almost certainly reveal whether Max Lord's Magic Rock was really the best villain the filmmakers could come up with. As for the flick itself, it hits the big screen on June 5, 2020.