Wonder Woman Nearly Unleashed Another Major DC Villain

Every so often, a writer drops a few what-if nuggets that make you rethink a movie you thought you knew. Jason Fuchs just did that for Wonder Woman, and the alternate paths are genuinely wild.

The Wonder Woman we almost got

On Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, Wonder Woman writer Jason Fuchs (also the credited writer on Argylle) walked through a handful of ideas that were in play before the 2017 hit landed on the version we saw. He also chatted about his latest gig, It: Welcome to Derry, and mentioned a Lobo movie script he worked on that ultimately stalled out. But the big DC reveals came from his Diana days:

• A totally different war: One early draft moved the story to the Crimean War instead of World War I. It even had Diana crossing paths with Florence Nightingale right before taking part in the Charge of the Light Brigade. That is a bold swing.
• A post-credits curveball: There was a version that saved a tag for after the credits featuring Kalibak, a deep-cut DC character and the firstborn son of Darkseid. The idea was to help bridge to Justice League, which hit theaters the very same year as Wonder Woman.
• A bigger role for everyday women: Fuchs wrote a third-act pass where regular human women would actively help turn the tide during Diana's final showdown with Ares, not just watch from the sidelines.

"The thing I most wish we'd done — there just wasn't time to do it — is in that third act... I was trying to find a way to involve regular human women in the success and not just Diana, who has powers."

Why Kalibak would have been a swing

If your DC lore radar just pinged, yeah, Kalibak is not exactly a household name. In the comics, he's Darkseid's firstborn and half-brother to Orion and Grayven. At one point, he was imprisoned on Earth during the Apokolips Civil War. Dropping him into a Wonder Woman stinger in 2017 would have been a clear thread to Justice League's bigger cosmic setup. Given how feverish the studio was about connecting those dots back then, that tracks.

The tone Fuchs was chasing

Fuchs said he was proud of how Wonder Woman played like a love letter, and he even compared the vibe he was aiming for to The Little Mermaid. You can feel that in the finished film, even if the Crimean War detour and the Kalibak tease never made it out of the development bubble.

Elsewhere in Fuchs-world

Beyond the DC talk, he discussed It: Welcome to Derry, which is his current project, and confirmed he wrote a Lobo feature script that did not move forward. No extra tea there, just that the interstellar biker badass nearly got a shot.

All told, it's a neat peek at roads not taken: a different war, a Florence Nightingale cameo (!), a cosmic villain waiting in the wings, and a push to put more non-superpowered women into the final fight. None of it happened, but it does make you imagine a very different 2017 for Diana.