Is Wonder Woman 1984 even called Wonder Woman 1984?

I have finally caught up with Wonder Woman 1984. In the end, I really could have just gone by myself at the small town theater in Mansfield last week, since I didn't end up seeing it with either my wife or my kids. 

My wife ultimately determined it was too grown up for the seven-year-old, which ended up not being the case. He's seen Captain Marvel and Ant-Man, and this was really no worse than those -- possibly better, in terms of potentially disturbing content. A guy gets transformed into a tiny green globule and wiped up and thrown in the toilet in Ant-Man. Nothing like that happens here. 

Plus he's been watching The Mandalorian, where no fewer than 60 stormtroopers are slaughtered in every episode. A friend and I were discussing it and we don't think there was actually a single death in all of Wonder Woman 1984. 

Anyway, what happened happened. I said I was over not going to see it in Mansfield, and truly, I am. 

So, eager to review it, I went by myself on Monday night, which did have the benefit of allowing me to see it on the largest possible screen with the boomingest possible sound. Whether that helped or not is something you can find out in my review, which I will link to the right if it is not already there at the time of this posting.

So I won't talk too much about my thoughts on the movie in this post. I will talk about how this movie challenges my ideas of how to write a movie's title when I write about it.

We all know of this movie as Wonder Woman 1984, but the movie doesn't know itself that way. Both times the title appears on screen -- at the beginning and at the end -- it appears as WW84. Almost like a political slogan. Almost like a sequel to WWI and WWII, though you'd have to tell me what happened in the 82 other world wars because I wasn't paying attention. 

It's really just a shorthand for us, since we know the movie is called Wonder Woman 1984. Abbreviations are cool. Acronyms are cool. Other examples exist in cinema. We've been doing this since T2, though in that case, the full title did appear on screen. 

It also gets at the DCEU's hesitation about actually referring to the character as Wonder Woman. If I'm not mistaken, this is now the fourth movie Diana Prince has appeared in without ever once being referred to as Wonder Woman. It's like the change to calling it KFC because they were so darn worried people would realize the chicken is fried. 

But the most problematic aspect of WW84 for me right now is that according to my own logic on movie titles, WW84 is actually the title of this movie.

Take my recent (nearly four years ago) post on Se7en, which you can find here. I only write it as Se7en because that's the only way the movie refers to itself within its own runtime. It never once, in the same two instances of appearing at the beginning and at the end, appears as "Seven." So Se7en is not just some cheeky way they advertised it, it's the actual title. 

If we consider Wonder Woman 1984 -- the film itself -- as the only available evidence to determine its title, we have to reach the same conclusion. If we just handed the film over to an alien life form studying earth culture, and asked them to use what they know of earth culture to tell us the title of the film, they would called it WW84.

But that's not the only available evidence we have. We have the poster above, which lists the abbreviation in bigger letters but also includes the full title below that. We have interviews with cast and crew. We have its IMDB page, which, granted, is only trying to use the available evidence to reach the same conclusions I'm trying to reach here. For what it's worth, WW84 is not even listed as an alternate title on IMDB. 

As with many of my discussions on The Audient, this one is pretty academic. We instinctively know the difference between a real title of a film and a more Twitter-friendly abbreviation of it. 

I still wonder, though -- pun not intended -- when they will finally commit to calling this character Wonder Woman. Sure, it's a kind of silly name that's left over from pulp comic books, a relic from another era. But I'm sure if either Superman or Batman were being named today, their creators would come up with something slightly less on the nose and slightly more "rad." That doesn't prevent those characters from being constantly referred to by those names, even with a certain fetishism when it comes to Batman. You don't hear those characters constantly referred to as Clark and Bruce, do you?

I'm wondering if we'll ever get the chance. I don't really know the future of DCEU movies -- I've been flocking to comic book movie headlines even less than usual lately -- so I don't even know if another Wonder Woman movie is planned, especially since this movie, whether it's Wonder Woman 1984 or WW84, is not nearly so beloved as the original. (Though it has a higher Metacritic score, 60, than I thought it might.) Also, they are running out of possible years in which to set such a sequel, if you want to set it significantly before the present day setting of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. Wonder Woman 1997 might work, but then again it might not.

Maybe WW97 would work better.