Home Entertainment Person claiming to be ex WB employee calls WONDER WOMAN "a mess", director responds

Person claiming to be ex WB employee calls WONDER WOMAN "a mess", director responds

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Late on Friday night, some interesting reading popped up on Pajiba. The popular site revealed an open letter from a person calling themselves “Gracie Law” (as in the Big Trouble In Little China character played by Kim Catrall) who claims to be an ex-Warner Bros employee. The letter was addressed to WB CEO Kevin Tsujihara, taking the studio head to task for a slew of underperforming and just plain bad movies the studio had pushed out over the last few years. She was specifically upset though about how the failures of these films resulted in hundreds of low level workers losing their jobs, while execs like Tsujihara and directors/producers like Batman v Superman‘s Zack Snyder just kept making money and being handed more projects to work on.

Here are a few extracts:

That year we pursued the storytelling vision of Adam Sandler’s Blended and Clint Eastwood’sJersey Boys. Failures. We pursued a potentially great summer movie like Edge of Tomorrowand completely botched its release. Same with Man From UNCLE. We dug in our heels and hoped The Hobbit Trilogy would somehow stop being a mediocre case of diminishing returns. Talented, loyal people packed their boxes and went home while your story tellers dropped the ball.

You, your executive team, and the vision of your ‘extraordinary storytellers’ that resulted in the loss of around one thousand jobs seem intent on crashing the ship into as much shit as you can find in the ocean by making inane decisions over and over again.

Zack Snyder is not delivering. Is he being punished? Assistants who were doing fantastic work certainly were. People in finance and in marketing and in IT. They had no say in a movie calledBatman V Superman only having 8 minutes of Batman fighting Superman in it, that ends because their moms have the same name. Snyder is a producer on every DC movie. He is still directing Justice League. He is being rewarded with more opportunity to get more people laid off. I’m assuming you yourself haven’t been financially affected in any real way. You and your studio are the biggest lesson about life one can learn: The top screws up and the bottom suffers. Peter Jackson phones it in and a marketing supervisor has to figure out a plan B for house payments.

Your uneven Hall H presentation at Comic Con this year was a ridiculous mess that ranged from rushed to boring. When Marvel announced their full slate of films with a fun fan event several years ago, you announced yours on a shareholder conference call.

You just don’t get it. And it’s not just DC movies, it’s your whole slate. Jupiter Ascending. Get Hard. Hot Pursuit. Max. Vacation. Pan. Point Break. Fucking PAN, you jerk. People lost their jobs and you decided Pan was a good idea. You think another Jungle Book is a good idea.

It’s an emotional missive that makes some good points, but also some very misinformed ones. Because of the latter as well as Pajiba’s lack of editorial evidence at all in verifying the author’s credentials one way or the other, I was very hesitant about the veracity of this letter. I would still highly recommend you give the full thing a read though.

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If you do, you will notice throughout the letter that the author really didn’t like any of WB’s DC Comics movies. In fact, it was them having recently seen Suicide Squad and feeling angry that in their opinion, Tsujihara and co messed up what appeared to be a sure thing, that prompted this letter.

And it appears that they don’t have kind things to say about WB’s next DC Comics movie, Wonder Woman, either.

What are you even doing? I wish to God you were forced to live out of a car until you made a #1 movie of the year. Maybe Wonder Woman wouldn’t be such a mess. Don’t try to hide behind the great trailer. People inside are already confirming it’s another mess.

Now its at this point that I have to reiterate that the identity of this letter’s author is never revealed, and as such their claims of having inside knowledge about Wonder Woman – a movie that is still heavily in production – is completely unverified. And Patty Jenkins, the acclaimed director for Wonder Woman, is really not happy about these unsubstantiated accusations leveled against her movie.

I’m guessing that the folk over at Pajiba may have run some kind of background check on this “Gracie Law”, (they’re not exactly a fly-by-night publication), and as such there’s a good chance this person did actually work for Warner Bros., as she claims. But that still doesn’t mean that they were high up the food chain or what they’re reporting is actually true though. As such, Jenkins has every right to shoot down this rumour. That being said, we all clearly the remember the last time a DC Comics movie’s trailer simply blew us away, and how that turned out in the end. So if you’re excuse me, I’m throwing handfuls of salt at both aspects of this story.

[UPDATE: Since time of writing, BMD’s Devin Faraci has written his own response to Pajiba’s article, basically slamming it for poor editorial oversight and also calling bullshit on its author’s claims.

Last Updated: August 15, 2016

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