Your First Look at Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva in Wonder Woman 1984
The casting of Kristen Wiig in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 was wonderful news. What made the news even sweeter was finding out the multitalented SNL alum was playing against type as the villain Cheetah. While there are several versions of Cheetah in the original DC Comics, Wiig will be playing Dr. Barbara Minerva, a friend and fellow archeologist of Diana’s who encounters an ancient evil that gives her the speed and prowess of a cheetah. These powers corrupt her—as they’re wont to do—and the villain Cheetah is created, a major foil for our heroine. Now we’ve got our first look at Wiig as Minerva, in what appears to be her pre-Cheetah phase, from Jenkins herself:
Enter Barbara Minerva… #WW84 pic.twitter.com/56f8Diu7So
— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) June 27, 2018
In the comics, Minerva was the heiress of a massive fortune, which is what gave her the opportunity to follow her passion for archeology to Africa. This is where she encountered the evil spirit that turns her into the super villain. Did Jenkins and her co-writers Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham stick to this origin story? We probably won’t know until we at least get our look at the first trailer, but several outlets have reported that in Wonder Woman 1984, Minerva starts out as a fan of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, of course). There have been plenty of superhero films in which the villian has a major love/hate relationship with the hero—one that springs immediately to mind is Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Yes, the Joker was an unhinged sociopath, but he did respect Batman, and as he famously said to Batman in the interrogation scene (stealing a line from Jerry Maguire, no less), “you complete me.”
Jenkins is doing a masterful job is teasing us with photos. She dropped this doozy of Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor somehow alive and well in 1984 that fired up the internet speculation machine on how that could be possible. Dream sequence? Time travel? Was Trevor saved during Wonder Woman and cryogenically frozen, Captain America style, until 1984? We won’t know for a while.
Wonder Woman 1984 will drop Diana Prince in the year of Margaret Thatcher, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The excitement for this sequel can’t be overstated. Wonder Woman represents, by far, DC Comics biggest commercial and critical hit, and the sequel is generating the kind of excitement for a DC-based film of the aforementioned The Dark Knight.
Wonder Woman 1984 hits theaters on November 1, 2019.
Featured image: GAL GADOT as Diana Prince in the action adventure “WONDER WOMAN 1984,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit:
Clay Enos/ ™ & © DC Comics
