Wonder Woman Rebooted And New Batman Game Years Away

Warner Bros. Games studios are in disarray following the failures of both Suicide Squad and MultiVersus. That’s according to a new report by Bloomberg that provides status updates for each of the company’s main studios, detailing how projects like Wonder Woman have struggled to progress while others like a new Batman: Arkham game are still years away from becoming a reality.

The publisher announced that Monolith Productions, the studio best known for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War, was working on a new single-play Wonder Woman game back in 2021, but new details and trailer footage have been sparse.

According to Bloomberg, the game tried to re-tool the studio’s hit nemesis system, whereby enemies took on evolving personalities and grew more powerful if they defeated you, into one oriented around friendship.

When that vision didn’t come together, the studio reportedly rebooted the project in favor of a more traditional action-adventure formula. Development has cost $100 million already, and it’s still possible the game might not ever ship, Bloomberg reports.

Rocksteady Studios, meanwhile, is moving forward with development on a new Batman game. Having only just shipped Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League last year, however, it’s unlikely a new single-player blockbuster—the format the studio is best known for—will arrive anytime soon. And if and when it does, it will be under new leadership following the exit of founders Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill in late 2022.

There’s also WB Games Montreal, which Bloomberg reports at one point wanted to make a quick “1.5″ version of Gotham Knights, the middling multiplayer brawler with remnants of an abandoned live-service model. Instead, it was put to work on supporting other WB projects and is in the midst of pitching a new game based on Game of Thrones. Finally, Avalanche Software is planning to release more content for Hogwarts Legacy and a sequel, a possible lifeline for the publisher amid all of its recent bad bets.

Why have things been going so poorly? The Bloomberg report lays some of the blame at the feat of outgoing executive David Haddad (some current and former staff told the outlet he seemed to have little actual familiarity with gaming), as well as the broader tumult at Warner Bros. amid a failed acquisition by AT&T and a chaotic merger with Discovery under CEO David Zaslav.

For example, WB Montreal was at one point going to work on a Flash game, that was until the DCU movie starring Ezra Miller bombed at the box office. Despite the tumult, the publisher is apparently still focused on converting its existing franchises into hit games, rather than investing in new IP.

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