The Warner Bros. film Wonder Woman comes out on June 2. It will be Wonder Woman’s first feature film. It will be the first live-action movie to use a female superhero as the headliner star. So why, less than six weeks away from its release, is there not more advertising for this movie?
Seriously. This movie, whether it is good or not, will be a big deal for Warner Bros. It will bring one of the biggest and most long-lasting DC Comics superheroes to life and bring much of her mythology to the big screen for the first time. It will star Gal Gadot, famed for her role in the successful Fast and Furious franchise, who portrayed the character for roughly seven minutes in last year’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice movie, and it will expand the DC Comics extended movie universe (DCEU) that began with Man of Steel and will continue into Justice League. It is also starring Chris Pine, who is one of Hollywood’s rising stars now after successes such as Star Trek and Into the Woods. It features Amazon warriors at a time when women, women geeks, and women geek characters are on the rise in pop culture.
These are all solid elements that should be used to get people excited about the film. Warner Bros. could use people getting excited after Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad made money but not nearly as much as was hoped, and both faced serious failure among critics and many fans. Normally, a studio ramps up its advertising for a new film starting two months before the release date. New TV spots assault audiences, each often giving a different extra clip, peeling away another small part of the story, the hero or the villain. New posters pop up so that audiences will already be familiar with the names of all protagonists and antagonists before they even walk into the theater.
But none of that is happening. The trailers and posters don’t tell us the names of any Amazon warriors other than Wonder Woman herself. They don’t give a context to the world. They don’t even reveal the main villain Wonder Woman will face in the movie. To know this, they’d have to hunt down press releases and interviews.
There are three reasons this might happen. 1, the studio might have realized the movie will be a flop and is trying to make it as small a financial loss as possible by not spending more on advertising. 2, the studio might not care if it’s a flop or not but has decided that they will not be doing a sequel or another movie in this style, in which case it’s not something deemed worthy of further investment. 3, the studio might be resting on laurels or relying on word of mouth and social media, which isn’t a terrible plan but you still need to give folks online something to get excited about other than just a reminder that the release date is coming out.
Whatever the reason, the lack of advertising has some fans understandably nervous. Will the movie be good in the end, no matter how much or little it’s advertised? We’ll find out in a little over a month.