Yet another Wonder Woman reboot effort bites the dust. David E. Kelley’s (Legally Mad, Boston Legal) pilot script for a new Wonder Woman series with Warner Bros. Television has reportedly been passed on by all five major broadcast networks due to “unfortunate timing.” The project has now been shelved.
This is an admittedly different genre for Kelley as he stated earlier on in the project:
“It’s a very, very different genre for me, a very tricky beast. I won’t know whether I’ve cracked it or not until I’ve finished it, but it’s going… If I can’t, I don’t want to delude Warner Bros. or anybody else that I should be doing it. The way I’ve always worked has been to write a script and discover, in the process of the writing, if it’s a fertile and creative place where I want to live. If I feel I can make the characters my own and it’s a world rich enough for me to revisit, that’s a good sign to me that it’s a series worth doing.”
ABC passed because of a potential DC vs. Marvel conflict as the network’s parent company, Disney had acquired Marvel Entertainment last year. ABC has been developing projects with Marvel like the Incredible Hulk series that Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro (Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) and Battlestar Galactica executive producer David Eick (Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, Bionic Woman) are heading up, and the AKA Jessica Jones adaptation by Melissa Rosenberg (Twilight) under the watchful eye of comic creator Brian Michael Bendis.
The Wonder Woman reboot was “never considered a fit” for the Fox Television Network, but the show was presented to them out of courtesy. WBTV’s sister network, The CW could not afford the series, CBS was split on the decision, and NBC could not secure the “type of license fee that the studio was seeking in order to do the show Kelley had envisioned” at this time.
Perhaps this project may be reassessed at a later date. Keep your fingers crossed, Wonder Woman fans!
