This Famous Female Director Got A Major Salary Boost
Well here is your good Friday news. According to a new Variety story report Patty Jenkins, the incredible director behind Wonder Woman, will make $9 million for writing and directing the highly anticipated sequel. Whoa!
Wonder Woman was already a game changer for female directors and Jenkins’s salary will also help them considerably. “You’re of course aware of the money,” Jenkins told Variety last October. “But I’ve never been more aware of a duty than I was in this deal. I was extremely aware that I had to make sure I was being paid what the male equivalent would be.” She continued, “Women who have not been in a system that allows them to build up the same level of pay as men are not able to be paid the same as men forever if that’s the way it continues. You have to ask for it to happen, and you have to ask when you’re the appropriate person.”
In addition to this salary bump, the Wonder Woman effect is clearly working as a relatively unknown female director, Cathy Yan, has been tapped to direct the new Margot Robbie-produced spinoff to Suicide Squad. A former Wall Street Journal reporter and a graduate of the NYU MBA/MFA Producing graduate program, she directed and wrote the low-budget but highly lauded indie film Dead Pigs, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Award for Ensemble Acting at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Robbie, who has become her own force in Hollywood as a producer with the success of I, Tonya, specifically wanted a woman to direct the film.
Robbie recently said in an interview with Collider, she felt it was vital to have “a female director to tell that story.” She said it was important to give a woman “the chance to do big budget stuff” noting that women often aren’t given the chance to direct blockbusters. “They always get ‘Here’s the tiny little film,’” she told Collider, “I was like, ‘I love action. I love action films. I’m a girl. What, are we meant to only like a specific thing?’”
According to a recent study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women filmmakers comprised only 7 percent of directors working on last year’s top 250 domestic-grossing films . This number has not changed much since 1998 (in fact, it went down) but Wonder Woman just knocked down a major wall for women and we can’t wait for the “R-rated girl gang film” Robbie is dreaming up.
