Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures
Among other things, Wonder Woman 1984 has been criticized for its lengthy run time at 150 minutes. That might be partly because barely anything was left on the cutting room floor, according to director Patty Jenkins.
“I didn’t cut out very many scenes in this movie,” Jenkins said in an interview with Collider. “I cut out only parts of scenes. The only scene I can even think of that we cut out was Steve and Diana hailing a cab outside of The Natural History Museum to get to Black Gold. That’s the only actual scene I think we cut out.”
Black Gold, in case you don’t remember, is the cooperative businessman Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) founded and where he leaves his son Alistair (Lucian Perez) to chill out on his own.
Unless there was a rad joke to go with it, it seems wise to cut out a scene where the main action is Diana (Gal Gadot) and Steve (Chris Pine) simply getting into a cab.
Jenkins also addressed whether she would want to do an in-fashion director’s cut. She said that if she did one, the only difference is that the movie’s pacing would be slower.
“No. I wouldn’t even want to. The reason why is because I grew up with the pacing of films being a little bit slower and I think that’s great. And when I show those movies to my son, there’s no part of him that thinks they’re too slow. When you watch Superman or you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, nothing about it is too slow.”
“We’ve gotten pretty quick moving in movies a lot now, but that doesn’t add up to emotion to me. But I’m also a director, so who knows? I may be indulging myself and just playing around in scenes for too long to sustain the movie. Generally directors do that when you leave them alone.”
“So that’s the only difference that I end up having is I would like to take a little more time and have a little more air all over the place in scenes we really had anyway. And that’s it. So, if I aired my longer cut, it would be 15 minutes or 10 minutes longer and everybody would say, ‘I couldn’t tell the difference,’ because it would just be a little bit slower pace across the board so it’s not really worth it.”
Basically, if you thought Wonder Woman 1984 was slow, it could have been slower.
