We have a new ‘Wonder Woman’ director (and she’s awesome)

While we were very disheartened to learn that Michelle MacLaren had dropped out as director of the Wonder Woman movie, the good news is the film has quickly found a great replacement! Variety just reported that Patty Jenkins has signed on to direct the film. The word is that Michelle MacLaren decided to leave the project due to creative differences, but it seems like it won’t create a major delay in production – which is still going to proceed full speed ahead in the fall of this year as originally planned.

Let us tell you why we’re incredibly psyched about this announcement. Not only is Patty Jenkins a fantastic choice as director, but she already has some impressive films under her belt. She’s definitely no stranger to the world of adapting comic books to film. She was originally the first choice to direct Thor: The Dark World, though she left the project (also due to creative differences). While she would have been the first woman to direct a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, being the new director for Wonder Woman means that she’ll be the first female director in the DC Comics film world. Pretty cool, right?

That being said, it’s also not her first time directing strong women from behind the camera. Her first feature film was 2003’s Monster, which depicted the true story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and won leading lady Charlize Theron an Oscar. She’s also directed episodes of TV shows like The Killing and Betrayal. She even won a Director’s Guild Award for her work on the pilot episode of The Killing. So yeah, she’s a pro.

In an interview with IGN, she talked about how she got her start in the industry — it wasn’t always a clear-cut path. As a girl, she decided she’d be a painter, because she was interested in the visual arts. “As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course and everything clicked and came together,” she explained. “This happened in 1989. Since then, it’s been a long road of educating myself in every possible way. I stayed in painting school and made a bunch of short films as a film student. Then I became a cameraperson for six years, and came here and did the American Film Institute director’s program and then I wrote [Monster].” She followed that up by directing one part of a Lifetime anthology series on breast cancer survivors, called Five. Now the stars have aligned and her big-budget break has arrived.

Wonder Woman will still star Gal Gadot as the titular Amazonian superhero, and is scheduled to lasso viewers into their seats in 2017. We’re really excited by the fact that there’s going to be a woman leading the project, because we know that Patty Jenkins is going to do some great things with this movie.

That being said… is it 2017 yet?

[Featured image via.]