[00:00.44]The movie Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins,
[00:05.80]has earned over $600 million worldwide
[00:10.60]since its opening day on June 2.
[00:14.52]That broke the record for a movie with a female director.
[00:19.84]Jenkins' film now tops a list that includes other successful movies like
[00:26.32]Fifty Shades of Grey, Frozen, Shrek, What Women Want,
[00:33.52]Sleepless in Seattle and A League of Their Own.
[00:39.68]Wonder Woman sold over $100 million in tickets on its opening weekend.
[00:46.16]That was more than both Transformers:
[00:49.33]Age of Extinction and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
[00:56.72]Jenkins says her first priority was to make the best Wonder Woman movie she could.
[01:04.16]"So the fact that I'm a woman, or she's a woman,
[01:06.64]or we're all women, or whatever, was a wonderful deep part of it.
[01:10.67]But you just tune it out completely because I'm just a filmmaker
[01:14.00]trying to make a film that I care about that much, anyway."
[01:17.28]Jenkins' Wonder Woman is a superhero.
[01:20.36]She is strong, fearless and has special powers.
[01:26.52]Her name is Diana.
[01:28.36]She leaves her perfect world on an Amazon island to fight evil during World War I.
[01:36.57]But Wonder Woman does not only solve problems with force
[01:41.56]like some male superheroes do.
[01:45.04]Jenkins says her Wonder Woman, played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot,
[01:51.36]is more complex than that.
[01:54.40]"It ends up being much more on an everyday scale about
[01:57.92]understanding and love and forgiveness and the complexity of life."
[02:02.72]Gadot says she and Jenkins had the same idea of what they wanted from Wonder Woman.
[02:10.20]"I am so lucky that Patty was the one to direct me.
[02:19.40]Her vision for Diana was in line with mine."
[02:25.36]Jenkins and Gadot are not the only female directors and actors making headlines in Hollywood.
[02:32.88]At the recent Cannes Film Festival,
[02:36.04]director Sofia Coppola won the best director award for her film The Beguiled.
[02:45.64]It comes out later this month in the U.S.
[02:49.80]Coppola's movie is a remake,
[02:53.32]which means someone else made a version of the same movie in the past.
[03:00.24]But Coppola tells the story from the perspective of the women in the story,
[03:06.16]instead of the men.
[03:09.32]Coppola's version focuses on the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst.
[03:18.00]They play teachers at a girls' boarding school during the U.S. Civil War.
[03:24.84]Their lives are changed when one of the girls
[03:28.72]finds a wounded soldier from the Union Army
[03:32.52]and brings him into the school to heal.
[03:35.96]Kidman says just because Jenkins and Coppola have been successful,
[03:41.64]that does not mean women are getting enough work in Hollywood.
[03:46.88]"Still only four percent of women directed,
[03:49.72]I think, the major motion pictures of 2016."
[03:53.92]And, there continues to be the question of whether female actors and directors
[03:59.68]are earning enough money compared to their male counterparts.
[04:04.20]That came up in 2015 when it was revealed that
[04:08.80]Jennifer Lawrence earned much less money than her male co-stars
[04:14.04]in the film American Hustle.
[04:17.32]Recently, a story that Gadot only earned $300,000
[04:23.36]for playing Wonder Woman went viral on social media.
[04:29.40]People could not believe the actress from the biggest movie of the summer
[04:34.88]earned millions of dollars less than Henry Cavill did for playing Superman.
[04:42.28]Cavill is said to have earned $14 million.
[04:47.24]It was a big headline, but it was not completely accurate.
[04:53.16]The Hollywood-focused publication Variety
[04:57.12]explained that $300,000 was Gadot's base pay.
[05:04.20]She will likely earn millions of dollars more from bonuses
[05:09.28]due to Wonder Woman's success this year and in the future.
[05:15.08]Even with Jenkins and Coppola's recent success,
[05:19.76]it is not clear that women will get to direct more major movies.
[05:25.00]Nicole Kidman is doing her part, however.
[05:29.04]While she was at Cannes in May,
[05:32.24]she made a promise to do at least one film every 18 months with a female director.
[05:39.20]"We, as women, have to support female directors. That's just a given, now.
[05:45.44]Hopefully that will change over time, but everyone keeps saying
[05:49.68]'oh it's so different now, oh it's so different now.' It isn't. Listen to that."
[05:53.68]I'm Dan Friedell.