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So, Wonder Woman has become the seminal superhero of 2017 and will probably the ambassador of the entire genre for the next few years. What’s more, the sequel has been now locked in for 2019 with Patty Jenkins set to return and heavy rumors it will be some kind of Cold War set story. That could mean a lot of things in the long run so I’ve compiled a list of 10 heroes, villains, storylines, and developments we might see in Wonder Woman 2.
Pretty much anything and everything is on the table at this point, especially with how the first film opened with 3 villains so it’s not like there’s a clear formula for how to proceed. What’s more, Wonder Woman’s franchise history has always been kind of a much so there’s really not as much source material to draw from as you might think, though there’s certainly plenty of very interesting and rewarding directions they could take- here are 10 of them.
CHEETAH
This one seems the most obvious but it’s worth diving into regardless. If there’s 1 Wonder Woman character most folks tend to know it’s Cheetah, though I'm loathed to use the term villain given her origins. She was an archeologist who ended up possessed by a cheetah spirit, which is what makes her evil-ish or more accurately amoral. She’s more of an anti-villain than anything else, sort of inline with the Batman villains Anarchy or Red Hood.
I’m not surprised Cheetah didn’t pop in Wonder Woman 1 as, while she’s integral to the franchise, she isn’t exactly blockbuster villain material. She’s not as much of a schemer as Ares and can’t threaten the world as easily without slipping into campy ‘60s style schemes like turning the whole world into cats or something. However, the Cold War focus could be just the thing to give the Cheetah a chance to shine. It was a time when the fate of the world hung on tiny decisions and individual diplomats, basically the perfect setting where one woman in the wrong place at the wrong time could change the course of history.
I’d actually be really on board with a sequel that tried to get smaller and tighter, maybe focusing on the Cheetah as a predator stalking a peace conference and Wonder Woman as the one force who can stop her. I mean, Atomic Blonde this year was a similarly small and taut Cold War thriller so it’s not like there isn’t precedent.
ROCKET REDS
So, the fact this sequel is rumored to be set in the Cold War means that Russia is most likely going to be involved in some capacity. I’m actually really curious to see if the Russian connection has any ties to Wonder Woman’s activities during World War 1 but we’ll see on that front. Regardless, Russia in the DC Comics has their own superhero force called the Rocket Reds.
They’re basically a team of government sponsored Iron Man types who’ve clashed with the American superheroes on numerous occasions. The team was created in the later ‘80s as part of DC’s attempt to make their universe more reflective of the real world, with one of the Rocket Red Brigade even serving on the Justice League International of the time.
Since then the Rocket Reds have popped up in the books pretty much anytime anyone goes to Mother Russia so getting them in the movie would be pretty cool. Most of all I think it’d be a nice change of pace to see Wonder Woman fight a group of high tech guys and then, ultimately, turn them to her side rather than just obliterate them. After all, compassion is supposed to be the Amazon way.
DOCTOR PSYCHO
Doctor Psycho isn’t really one of the bigger Wonder Woman villains but I feel like he’d be a solid fit for a Cold War film. He’s a little person with vague psychic powers, mainly in the realm of mind control, and is usually portrayed as pretty disturbed. He’s also occasionally been tied to Russia and the Soviet Union so there’s a built-in back-story reason to bring him into whatever mission Wonder Woman is up to during the Cold War. Most of all, I think he’d be an interesting antagonist as someone who couldn’t just punch Wonder Woman more as his grand master plan.
What’s more, you have to imagine the option of bringing in Peter Dinklage as the villain of Wonder Woman 2 would be a pretty big reason to go this route for DC/WB, especially with Game of Thrones wrapping up next year. He could also work well as a villain who more explicitly fights Diana on the battlefield of ideas, spreading chaos and discord through his mental powers just as she seeks to inspire people to peace.
VERONICA CALE
Veronica Cale is one of the stranger Wonder Woman foes overall. Largely because she’s such a young character, coming about in the early 2000s under the stewardship of Greg Rucka. She was basically intended to be Wonder Woman’s Lex Luthor though I’m not sure she ever really achieved that lofty goal. However, the corporate connections would be an interesting aspect of the Cold War setting to explore. What’s more, Cale has a whole history tied up with Darkseid and the New Gods being introduced in Justice League as well as Black Adam, whose own solo film is allegedly in pre-production.
I’m not saying that Wonder Woman 2 should choose its bad guys specifically to lay the groundwork for future stories but at the same time if it was going to go that route Cale would be a pretty decent approach. The biggest problem with her character is probably that she doesn’t have a real way to go head-to-head with Diana: no powers and no mech suit to speak of, so if she was the bad guy she’d probably end up partnered with someone else like Dr. Psycho or perhaps…
DOCTOR CYBER
Consider this the beginning of the “long shots” section that I like to include with every list. Regardless, I’d really dig seeing Dr. Cyber show up in this Wonder Woman movie because I think she’d be the best fit with the setting to give us a central woman antagonist. That was honestly one of the problems I had with the 1st film, the way it relegated Dr. Poison to a background character in the great scheme of things. Dr. Cyber is basically a mad scientist villain with a hard leaning towards cybernetic technology- that’s really about it but that’s also all you really need.
She’d be a perfect fit as a big bad, stomping around her HQ, making species, and dispatching her lieutenants and waves of Cyborg henchmen in true Rita Repulsa style. I especially think it’d be interesting to see her creepy, retro Cyborg tech given Wonder Woman 2 will apparently be set in the past again. You could even tie her technology in to Cyborg in the Justice League in some way, which would be a nice Easter egg.
WAR OF THE GODS
So now we’ve moved on from characters to storylines, specifically the ‘80s event story that first attempted to wed the warring franchises of Shazam and Wonder Woman. That’s a little obscure so I’ll clarify: War of the Gods was an event comic in the ‘80s that had the Roman and Greek Gods go to war, with Diana as the champion for the Greek Gods and Shazam as the champion of the Roman Gods. I don’t really know how this idea would square with Wonder Woman killing off all the Gods in the prologue but, at the same time, the crux of the film was that Ares was still alive so I don’t see why Zeus and company couldn’t still be around.
Mostly I feel like this would be a solid way to integrate Shazam into the DCEU in a more pronounced way, especially given he’s got a movie coming in 2019 as well. I wouldn’t assume there’d be a full crossover ala Thor: Ragnarok just yet but I could see the strands of the Shazam mythos getting laid down in Wonder Woman 2. At the very least, the warring Gods storyline could easily be adapted to warring ideological beings between East and West as a metaphysical representation of the Cold War.
AMAZONS ATTACK
I should clarify here, I’m not necessarily advocating they do this story I just feel like there’s a good chance we’ll end up seeing it. So, during the mid-2000s DC was felt their major franchises had gotten somewhat off track and dedicated themselves to righting them through a serious of big shake-ups and new events. In the case of Wonder Woman, that shake-up came in the form of 2 major stories, the first of which was Amazons Attack.
Amazons Attack feels like exactly the kind of story that an editing department would put together as an event- slick and soulless but designed around being as marketable as possible. The idea was that Wonder Woman had been taken prisoner by the US government, which led the Amazons to invade America, Washington D.C. specifically.
The story isn’t terribly well remembered now but I feel like the premise of just Amazons invading the modern world could be salvageable. A big part of the story was the re-introduction of a secondary group of Amazons known as the Bana who embraced man’s world and technology, which is an idea I think the films would benefit from.
Really, the biggest obstacle to this idea is that the film’s Amazons were so shockingly weak against conventional weapons so it’s hard to imagine them successfully invading man’s world without the help of the Bana and maybe some additional magic creatures.
RISE OF THE OLYMPIANS
This was the second of the two big stories DC pushed in the mid-2000s as part of their Wonder Woman rehabilitation initiative. It’s sort of an odd duck in that it was heavily marketed as being about a newly formed race of male Amazons called the Olympians it’s really not about that at all. It’s one of those things where you get the unique sense there was a feud between the writers and the editors but none of that really matters here.
I mean, most comic book movies are just cannibalizing storyline names and broad strokes more than anything else like Age of Ultron and Civil War so the only thing that really matters is that there is, canonically, a group of villainous male Amazons led by an evil Wonder Woman type named Achilles. Well, I call these guys evil but that’s a bit of an overstatement- they were more authoritarian. Their mandate from Zeus was to force peace upon mankind, an idea that I think could translate well to the Cold War setting and work well as a more extreme version of Diana’s own mission.
DIANA PRINCE
So there isn’t really a great single term for this era in Wonder Woman history but there was a time in the early ‘70s when she gave up her powers. I admit I haven’t read as much of this era so I don’t know all the ins and outs of how this came to be but basically Wonder Woman lost her powers and became a kind of traveling kung-fu superhero. She adopted a new costume and got a wise old master character to teach her martial arts and then went around using her new karate skills to help people in need.
Admittedly this would be a weird thing to integrate into a whole movie, especially with how much pressure there is for superhero films to get bigger with each installment, but I’d still actually quite like to see it show up. You could do it in a Spider-Man 2 style of Diana losing her powers as a mid-movie sequence or even go more of a Logan route and strip things down for the sequel, either way, it’d be a shame to just close out this era completely because it was too odd to integrate.
NU’BIA
Let’s be upfront about this one: Nu’bia is most likely not going to be in Wonder Woman 2. She’s a far too obscure character for a DC movie to pull out of nowhere and is only recently being rediscovered by modern comics fans. I mean, I’m one of the biggest comic book dorks there is and the only way I knew about Nu’bia was thanks to a HeroClix figure of her, that’s how obscure we’re talking.
Still…if they DID bring her in it would be one hell of a thing and honestly, I really wish they do because Wonder Woman was in desperate need of women of color. Nu’bia is actually Wonder Woman’s sister in the comics, a basic concept that could easily fit into the film's world of Wonder Woman as the daughter of Zeus. She’s had a somewhat antagonistic relationship with Wonder Woman over the years, mainly because of the conspiracy and secrecy around her birth being so rigidly enforced.
Really, all you need to know about Nu’bia is that she’s every bit as powerful as Wonder Woman and black, which seems like something the world needs right about now. At the very least, it’d be a great way to expand the Wonder Woman stable of characters in an inclusive way, like how Marvel has made a point of giving their heroes black best friends like War Machine, Falcon, and Heimdall.
Look, the bottom line is that as we go forward superhero films are looking to be more inclusive and Nu’bia would be a great way for Wonder Woman to be a part of that trend instead of just resting on the laurels of being the most empowering superhero film white women ever got.
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