Earlier this week Warner Bros. Interactive officially cancelled its Wonder Woman game and shut down three different studios — Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego.
This came shortly after the shut down of Player First’s Multiversus, and while Monolith was in the midst of production on Wonder Woman.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who broke the initial story, part of the reason Wonder Woman was cancelled was because of the catastrophic failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Speaking on Kinda Funny, Schreier gave a more detailed timeline of how things played out with Wonder Woman.
Officially announced three years ago, Wonder Woman was supposed to be an open world action game in the same vein as Monolith’s Middle-Earth titles, and was even supposed to feature the same Nemesis System, but with a twist. It would have been a “reverse” Nemesis System, where Diana would befriend enemies and recruit them to her side, instead of continuously clashing.
But in 2023, around 14 months ago, WB management rebooted the game to be a more linear-style God of War experience, removing the Nemesis System. This change, apparently, didn’t go over well with leadership at Monolith, and led to the resignation of almost all of the studio’s directors. It should also be noted that Schreier says Monolith had an original IP cancelled in 2021 and reportedly didn’t want to make another Lord of the Rings game.
Things obviously were already rocky with the game’s development, but the performance of games like Suicide Squad might have been the final nail, as that reboot of Wonder Woman just couldn’t take off.
“But by then, it was kind of too late especially because last year was so bad for the Warner Brothers Games organization,” Schreier says, “Last year Suicide Squad was a humungous flop – they wrote off $200 million because of that. MultiVersus and Quidditch Champions, also both flops, [they] wrote off another $100 million because of that.”
The end result of all this money spent seems to be WB Discovery ousting David Haddad as head of the games division and installing JB Perrette instead. In an official statement WB said the studio closures were a “strategic change in direction,” as it focuses more on its big series — such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Mortal Kombat, and DC.
\There’s still a handful of studios under WB’s banner, namely Avalanche Software, which we know is working on the Hogwarts Legacy Sequel, and Rocksteady Studios, tasked with the creation of a new Batman game. But in the wake of Suicide Squad and everything else, it’s hard to feel certain about the future.
