Movies always go through numerous changes over the course of production. There are always scenes that end up getting cut for one reason or another. Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins has now spoken about the parts of her movie that were the most difficult to excise. According to Jenkins, there were no specific scenes or major moments that she wishes she could have kept. Instead, it was numerous small moments that the director says were the hardest to cut.
There's a million little things. If I had my druthers, the movie would be longer with little tiny jokes and moments that were hard to lose. Particularly because the great thing about these actors is you have such talented funny capable people, so that was already great material for them to work from and then they all just like every mess around would be delightful. So it's really hard to cut a movie like that down, and so just that sort of stuff --- details.
There all sorts of reasons that scenes get chopped down or cut entirely from films. Often it happens because scenes that aren't absolutely necessary get cut out in order to make a movie's runtime more manageable. It seems that this was the reason that several little moments were edited from the final version of Wonder Woman. Based on what Jenkins says to Screen Rant, the removal of these "little things" were just done to cut the movie down. While many of these big comic book blockbusters are seeing run times an excess of two hours these days, there's a point at which even the best movie is simply too long, and you never want your audience to feel like they're waiting for a movie to be over. While each individual joke would have only added a minute or so to the runtime, keeping them all would have added up to a much longer movie.
Considering the critical and commercial success that Wonder Woman has achieved, it would seem likely that Patty Jenkins is more than happy with the version of the movie that was released in theaters. The fact that the small details are the only things she wishes she could change means that all the bigger stuff, like character arcs and plot lines, turned out exactly how she wanted it. She also liked working on the film enough to be willing to direct the sequel as well. The follow up is already set for a December 2019 release.
Hopefully, we'll have a chance to see at least a few of these great moments in the special features attached to Wonder Woman's Blu-Ray release. The film is being released digitally August 29 and will hit Blu-Ray on September 19.
