Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins developing sequel with DC Films

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and DC Films co-head Geoff Johns are working on a treatment for a sequel to the blockbuster hit, Johns said in an interview with Variety. It’s the first official confirmation from Warner Bros. that the movie is in some stage of production.

“Patty and I are writing the treatment right now,” Johns said. “The goal is to make another great Wonder Woman film. I had a blast making it with Patty the first time. We’ve got a cool idea for the second one.”

Jenkins already seemed to have plenty of ideas for a follow-up. Only a few days after Wonder Woman was released, she told Entertainment Weekly that she would set the next installment in the United States, rather than Europe. Toby Emmerich, president of Warner Bros. Pictures, also offered a bit of a hint as to the Wonder Woman sequel’s setting to Variety today, saying, “It will take place somewhere between 1917 and 2017.”

Johns, a veteran comics writer and chief creative officer of DC Comics, and his fellow DCEU co-runner Jon Berg, a Warner Bros. executive, were put into their posts after an organizational shakeup at Warner Bros. put the company’s DC Comics adaptations into their own division for the first time. The move came in May 2016, hard on the heels of franchise flagship Batman v Superman’s disastrous reviews and the meteoric drop-off between its opening and second weekend box office results.

Berg minced no words when asked whether Warner Bros. learned any lessons from the underperforming, poorly reviewed installments of the DCEU.

“You would be silly not to analyze how a movie was received — what went right and what went wrong on the making of a movie,” he told Variety. “On Suicide Squad, the movie did incredibly well commercially. It didn’t work narratively. You had some great casting and some great characterizations, but where the story fell down was on narrative, on plot. We could do better. Batman v Superman was tonally dark. People didn’t respond to that.”

“Anyone who knows and loves the DC Universe,” Johns said, “knows that a lot of that has to do with its hope and optimism,” implying that Wonder Woman has been such a success because it celebrated those values inherent in the character. He’s not the only one to make that connection.