Following the recent news that Warner Bros. had cancelled the Wonder Woman game that’d long been in the works at Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith Productions, and shut down that studio along with two others, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has now shared a bit more context about the events that led to all of that happening.
Basically, it sounds like exactly the kind of corporate indecision fest you’d expect, with the seeds for where Monolith ended up with Wonder Woman having reportedly been planted back in 2021, when Warner Bros. said no to a new IP that it’d just kinda been letting the studio plan, even though the publisher allgedly wasn’t interested in new IP.
Speaking on Kinda Funny Games Daily, Schreier dug a bit deeper into the chain of events at the studio following the arrival of 2017’s Middle-earth: Shadow of War, stating that Monolith had then begun planning a new IP codenamed Legacy, which would be a “procedural narrative thing experimenting with some of the ideas they’d explored with the nemesis system” in those LOTR games.
However, there was one big problem about this thing Monolith spent about three years working on, according to Schreier. “During this time, it’s kind of clear to people at Warner Bros and [at] Burbank in their HQ that this game is not going to happen, because people at Warner Bros are not interested in new IP,” he said.
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So, a weird period in which kind of meaningless and confusing meetings were happening reportedly ensued, during which there was “refusal to make decisions”, before the order came down to can the new IP in 2021. Why did it happen that way? Well, Schreier alleges earlier in the that chat that he’s been told recently departed Warner Bros. Games boss David Haddad’s tenure featured plenty of “classic executive indecision, people refusing to make calls, because making calls means exposing yopurself to risk, and if you make calls that expose yourself to risk then you [could] lose your cushy job”.
Once the new IP was cancelled, a lot of Monolith’s leadership departed, and the studio had to stumble on with Wonder Woman, first in a way that incorporated a sort of Wonder Woman-ised interpretation of the nemesis system as has previously been reported, then as a “God of War-style more traditional action game”. “By then, it was kind of too late,” Schreier added, “especially because last year was so bad for the Warner Bros. organisation”.
So, a damn shame, especially since that new IP sounds like it could have been pretty interesting.
