As if anything couldn’t get worse for WB Games, a new report has revealed that the reason players have heard very little about Monolith Productions’ upcoming Wonder Woman game since its announcement is due to the fact that its development is going absolutely terribly, to the point where some insiders believe the Amazonian’s digital adventure still stands a good chance of being completely shelved.
First announced all the way back in 2021, the Middle-Earth series developer’s next game has been a ghost ever since, with the only word regarding its development in the past few years being a report from Kinda Funny CEO Greg Miller alleging that its development was “very troubled”.
Now, in a near repeat of that situation, Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier has likewise alleged that according to his sources, the past twelve-months have not seen few significant improvements in Wonder Woman‘s behind-the-scenes operations – to the point where even after being rebooted, seeing a change in directors, and having spent over $100 million thus far, it’s still a year away from launching, if it ever does.
Amidst a wider report on WB Games’ future following the recent stepping down of division head David Haddad, Schreier explained, “One of the company’s biggest bets in development, a video game based on Wonder Woman, has struggled to coalesce, according to people familiar with the project. Early last year, it was rebooted and switched directors. The game has already cost more than $100 million, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information, and is still years away from release, if it ever makes it to market.”
As to how the developer found themselves in this situation, Schreier says that while their 2017 release Middle-earth: Shadow of War did well enough, it failed to surpass the sales success of its predecessor, Shadow of Mordor.
Thus, for their next game, Monolith turned their attentions to creating a new franchise, which they hoped would allow them to play around with the idea of procedural storytelling.
But in typical corporate fashion, Warner Bros. executives weren’t interested in new characters and universes, instead pushing the studio to marry their concept with one of the company’s existing IPs, such as Game of Thrones or one of DC’s many superheroes.
And though Monolith struggled to execute this request in a satisfactory way, said executives, well-aware of the project’s troubles, dragged their feet in cancelling the game, only doing so in 2021 after three years of dev time.
Frustrated with Warner Bros.’ poor management, Monolith Productions studio head Kevin Stephens, along with a good portion of the cancelled game’s directors, quit their positions and left to form Cliffhanger Games under EA (based on Stephens’ LinkedIn profile, speculation suggests that the game’s cancellation was handed down sometime around May 2021).
Meanwhile, those who stayed proceeded to turn their efforts to Wonder Woman – and the rest was history.
While Schreier makes no mention of whether or not Monolith Productions has repurposed any elements of their cancelled game for Wonder Woman, he does note that at one point, the studio had been toying with the idea of repurposing Middle-earth‘s Nemesis system in such a way as to allow the titular heroine to befriend enemies rather than turn them into recurring rivals.
Nevertheless, per Schreier’s own recap of the situation, this idea has since been “tossed out in favor of a more traditional action-adventure game”.
Yet, despite this change, the Bloomberg reporter notes that the game’s fate still “remains in question, according to the people familiar with the business, because of challenges following the changes in Monolith’s leadership and issues surrounding the game’s technology.”
Notably, Schreier did not provide any details as to what specific ‘technology’ was proving troublesome for Monolith Productions, nor whether the claimed leadership issues had to do with the studio’s internal team or the aforementioned Haddad.
While concrete information regarding Wonder Woman remains non-existent, what is known for certain is that, at the very least, the game will have nothing to do with the Amazing Amazon’s latest video game appearance in the ill-fated Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
After all, as revealed in the ill-fated title’s hastily made final ending, while the Justice League members slaughtered by Amanda Waller’s secret kill team were actually just clones, thus allowing the Suicide Squad to free the originals and push the Coluan threat back into space once and for all.
But seeing as she was the only member of the team not to be abducted by Brainiac, this means the actual, true Diana was killed at the hands of Superman – and it’s unlikely Monolith Productions, with all their already-existing woes, would want to deal with the headache of trying to write a satisfactory reason to visit the better-left-for-dead continuity.
