The following story contains very mild spoilers for Patty Jenkins’ sequel Wonder Woman 1984, so stop reading right now if you haven’t yet seen the movie and you want to go into it cold.
By now, you realize that Patty Jenkins came up with a clever way to bring the deceased Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back for the sequel Wonder Woman 1984, even though he died at the end of Wonder Woman… a movie that was set during World War I, as it is. Having Trevor back creates complications, though having Pine back improves the movie, as his chemistry with Gal Gadot is off the charts.
It’s not a surprise that Chris Pine is back. He’s featured in the trailers for Wonder Woman 1984, and the marketing materials single out his involvement in the Cairo truck chase sequence. But when we had an opportunity to interview Pine about this sequel, he told us how the Cairo fight had a much longer choreographed sequence to it that didn’t make it into the final movie. He lays it out in the interview clip above.
You never really know why action sequences are trimmed for final cut. It could be that a fight scene was going on too long, disrupting the timing of what might have been a tighter sequence. Chris Pine is right that the sequence does cut short a little bit of Steve Trevor’s impact in the moment. He punches one guy in the truck, and then finds himself getting pulled down into the belly of the beast. But it way that he describes the fight as having a Wack-A-Mole quality to it makes us want to see the full fight. Maybe on the eventual Wonder Woman 1984 DVD?
Elsewhere in the interview, Chris Pine opened up about the fact that he and Patty Jenkins have worked to model Steve Trevor after Indiana Jones, with Pine explaining:
I’ve said it about basically every hero I’ve ever played is that Harrison Ford’s reluctant hero is my touchstone for pretty much all of these types of guys. The humanness of it, and the fact that he always feels like he doesn’t want to be there but he HAS to be there. The fact that he’ll try his hardest but, you know, getting hit hurts. Punching hurts.
And Pine, in the conversation, admits that they modeled the lengthy Cairo sequence after the infamous scene in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which, now that you know it, seems really obvious.
How will it work for movies that go to theaters and HBO Max? Will they also get a DVD release? Can we get deleted scenes and extended sequences on those releases, such as Wonder Woman 1984? I sure hope so, because after listening to Chris Pine describe Steve Trevor’s longer fight scene in Patty Jenkins’ sequel, I’m excited to one day see it.
