Happy Monday, everyone. Hope y’all had/are still having a great holiday weekend. Or at least one filled with as little trauma as possible. Though superhero fandom and indeed most film audiences around the world are still processing the horror of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. (I, for one, would love to be a therapist right now, just for the amount of money to be made off of little Billy’s reaction to Batman’s mommy’s grave erupting with blood.) So even as Warner Brothers executives refill their hot tubs with cognac and caviar, a few enlightened publicists are doing their best to reduce the amount of second-week box-office drop-off and insure turnout for the next five years of the studio’s DC slate. In today’s Movie Morsels, we have Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins talking Wonder Woman, James Wan discussing Aquaman, and more!

Wonder Woman

Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is one of the very few bright spots in Batman v Superman, primarily because she’s not given much of the film’s awful dialogue and is actually permitted to smile. Still, the actress remarks in a new LA Times interview that the Princess Diana we’ll see in her solo film debut will differ from the one to which we were just introduced…

“The Wonder Woman that you see in Batman v Superman is a woman who has been around, and she’s very experienced. She understands a lot about man. Whereas in the standalone movie we are telling the grown-up story. Diana becoming Wonder Woman, and this was a story that was never told before. When she starts this journey, she’s very pure. She’s more naive, she’s this young idealist who does not really understand the complexities of life and the complexities of men.”

Meanwhile, director Patty Jenkins says that the Amazons we see in Wonder Woman will be a great deal more diverse than the whiter-than-white group featured in the film’s first marketing image (pictured at the top of this page)…

Thanks all. Excited to share! And no worries. Lots of great, diverse characters on Themyscira. This is Diana’s direct family. More soon!!

— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) March 24, 2016

[LA Times]

Aquaman

If film audiences are recoiling at the sight of a bitter, destructive Superman, one can only imagine how they’ll handle an emo Aquaman. Fortunately, at this weekend’s WonderCon, director James Wan (while promoting The Conjuring 2) said the character will retain a sense of fun he makes his solo film debut. But the horror filmmaker is definitely making room for some monsters…

“I think, like most people, we are familiar with Aquaman. We grew up reading or watching this character on the peripheral. I was never so in depth with Aquaman as, let’s say, I was with X-Men. I grew up loving X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman. Those are obviously the key big ones, but there’s always something kind of cool about Aquaman still, the idea of creating a huge world that is on our planet. That’s the thing about Aquaman that’s cool is he’s not an alien, right? He’s from our planet and he’s from a society that we’re not privy to in the context of the story. Isn’t it crazy to think that we’ve explored space more than we have explored the depths of our ocean? That just fires up my imagination about potential sea monsters and cool creatures, that kind of stuff.”

[Slashfilm]

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Let’s take one more shot at Batman v Superman today, shall we? Because it’s just too much fun not to… Zack Snyder has confirmed that the CIA agent accompanying Lois Lane on assignment in the beginning of the film — the one who [SPOILERS] winds up getting [REDACTED] — is in fact Jimmy Olsen, the beloved pal of Superman who has long served as surrogate for the countless little children who’ve grown up thrilling to the character’s adventures. Why? Because Zack Snyder hates nice things…

In a new EW interview, the director remarks, “We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go, and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”

[EW]

King Kong: Skull Island

With Universal’s King Kong: Skull Island due out on March 10 of next year, the studio will be introducing a related attraction to its Orlando theme park this summer. And a new behind-the-scenes featurette has just landed online revealing the creatures of Skull Island: Reign of Kong…

[Universal]

The Dresser

Finally today… STARZ is about to debut its first-ever original feature-length production — an adaptation of the perennially popular play The Dresser. The film stars Anthony Hopkins as a cantankerous actor and Ian McKellen as his right-hand man in war-torn England amidst a staging of King Lear. Here’s the trailer…

[STARZ]

Images: Warner Bros.

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