Throughout the course of the DCEU, we saw Wonder Woman in a variety of environments – in her native home of Themiscyra with the Amazons; fighting through the battlefields of World War I with Steve Trevor; living in 1980s USA in Wonder Woman 1984; and battling alongside Batman and Superman in the present-day in Justice League. But, once upon a time, there was an idea to present a different kind of early Wonder Woman story – one that would have seen her fighting in the Crimean War in the 1800s. All that came of the possible project – dubbed ‘Wonder Woman 1854’ – was an image that Snyder shared on social media, with Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince surrounded by soldiers and… er, holding three severed heads.
In Empire’s major new interview with Snyder – in The Acolyte issue – we posed him your reader questions. And among them came up the topic of Wonder Woman 1854, and what it might have been. Allow Snyder himself to explain. “The idea of that was an early riff we were doing: once Wonder Woman left the island in search of Ares, what happened to her in her different incarnations?” he states. “My idea for it was that she would travel around the world looking for Ares and she would go to every place where there was conflict.”
The resulting story would have been a combination of love and war. “On those battlefields she found these lovers, warriors, and they would age out because she is immortal,” he elaborates. “They would be her lover for ten years or they might die in battle, and it was probably sad for a lot of the guys because they would see her starting to be nice to the next young soldier and be like, ‘Oh, I’m being replaced.’ But all the guys that she had with her were those loyal warriors she found on the battlefields all over the world.”
Ultimately, the story would have led Diana to Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor. “We talked about if Steve Trevor was there in Crimea,” Snyder confirms. Instead, Wonder Woman’s journey through the Snyder-verse took another path – but that one shot, from Stephen Berkman, remained. “It was never a screenplay, but we talked about it so much that it kind of had its own life.” There you have it: wonder no more.
Read Empire’s full Zack Snyder interview – answering reader questions on everything from sci-fi, to Superman, to Shrek – in The Acolyte issue, on sale Thursday 11 April. Order a copy online here. Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver comes to Netflix on 19 April.