Summary
Earlier this week,Warner Bros. Games announced that it had cancelled Wonder Womanand shuttered developer Monolith among two other developers. However, the studio was reportedly already “eviscerated” years ago, back in 2021.
AfterMiddle-earth: Shadow of Warwas released in 2017, Monolith wanted to move away fromThe Lord of the Ringsto do something original. So, it began work on a new IP codenamed “Legacy”, a procedural narrative game experimenting further with the ideas behind the Nemesis system. However, Warner Bros wasn’t, and still isn’t, interested in new IP, which allegedly caused a “stand-off” between the two parties.
“Warner Bros. knows it’s not gonna allow this to happen. Monolith has a lot of sway and clout because you have these guys who’ve been working on these games for a while, had a lot of success with the Middle-earth games, and so they feel they have the autonomy and the clout to do what they want,” Jason Schreier explained onthe Kinda Funny Podcast. “There are some attempts here and there to squeeze IPs into Legacy, but it doesn’t quite work out […] Cut to 2021, the spring of that year — March or April, something like that — word comes down, ‘Hey, this isn’t gonna happen.'”
Legacy’s Cancellation Led Monolith Leadership To Resign
As a result of Legacy’s cancellation, “Monolith’s leadership team — the entire leadership team — quits. Every single director.” Many of these, along with those working under them, would go on to form Cliffhanger Games at EA, and arenow working on Black Panther. However, that left Monolith struggling to stay afloat. It hadn’t released a game in four years, but needed to start from scratch on a new project while simultaneously rebuilding its entire leadership team.
Monolith is essentially eviscerated at this point.
As such, Monolith agreed to develop a Wonder Woman game. Just a few months later, it announced the project to the public with a CG trailer at The Game Awards. There wouldn’t have been much to show yet, but Schreier speculated that this reveal was designed to drive recruitment, given the many resignations that had just taken place, while also buying more development time.
Development itself also got off to a bad start. Reportedly, there was a debate about whether to use Unreal Engine, but Monolith stuck with its internal studio tech. But the loss of engineering talent who helped make the tech in the first place made it “trickier” to work with the internal engine.
Things were only made even worse following last year, which was disastrous for Warner Bros.Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,MultiVersus, and Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions all lost millions of dollars, adding even more pressure to Monolith, who had just rebooted Wonder Woman a year prior. Unfortunately, this only snowballed into the game’s cancellation and the studio’s closure.
