Zack Snyder Details Scrapped Plans for Wonder Woman 1854
Snyder says the idea spun out of wondering what different iterations of Diana might have faced while hunting Ares.
An early, Elseworlds-inspired idea for Zack Snyder's DC Extended Universe would have seen Wonder Woman head to the Crimean War. The story, which apparently bounced Warner Bros. as "Wonder Woman 1854," was a riff on the plot to Wonder Woman, in which Diana left the island to pursue Ares earlier. And, according to Snyder, the story still would have led to Steve Trevor, with his multiversal destiny tied to Diana's. That might seem a little odd to casual fans, but to anyone who's ever read Elseworlds stories where Batman or Superman gets transposted into the Civil War or the far future, you know carrying the supporting cast along is pretty standard.
Snyder says the Wonder Woman 1854 idea never got as far as being an actual script. Still, it seems like they had a lot of ideas, and that it was bouncing around for long enough that there were plenty of details still on Snyder's mind.
"The idea of that was an early riff we were doing: once Wonder Woman left the island in search of Ares, what happened to her in her different incarnations?" Snyder told Empire. "My idea for it was that she would travel around the world looking for Ares and she would go to every place where there was conflict."
Snyder had shared a photo to social media back in 2021, which mirrored the World War I photo seen in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice but featured a different cast of characters, and Diana carrying the severed heads of enemies. You can see that below.
"On those battlefields she found these lovers, warriors, and they would age out because she is immortal," Snyder told Empire, in the new issue of the magazine out now. "They would be her lover for ten years or they might die in battle, and it was probably sad for a lot of the guys because they would see her starting to be nice to the next young soldier and be like, 'Oh, I'm being replaced.' But all the guys that she had with her were those loyal warriors she found on the battlefields all over the world."
That, Snyder explained, is where Trevor would come into the story, with Snyder noting that when they discussed the story, Trevor would have ended up in Crimea.
It's easy to see how this version of Diana -- more violent and without a permanent romantic attachment -- could have been a controversial take on the character, but it's also illustrative of how much flexibility the filmmakers had given her immortality and her centuries-long story.