People bring up DCSPHG and Absolute Wonder Woman, but I think the only unequivocal success Wonder Woman has had, not in a niche, but with normies and mainstream audiences was Gal Gadot's first Wonder Woman movie,and her subsequent cameos
Lynda Carter in the 70s as well, but yes. WW really struggled to have much of anything to her name, a lot of it due to aversion to female heroes, but also, she lacked much to really build off of from comics. She never had a major story or arc like Batman, Superman or the Titans did. Hell even the Flash and Green Lantern have things like Flashpoint and Geoff John’s runs.
She is a character no one can seem to figure out fully. The clash between Greek Pantheon, and Feminist characters, along with the randos leads to a disjointed rogues that has no real theme or consistency. One minute she is fighting literal Gods, the next its some tard in a blue snowman suit. It often feels like she is trying to ape off of more defined heroes since her own rogues rarely get to amount to anything.
DC seems to basically have had an advantage in the 2000s with the Cartoons (BTAS, STAS, JL/ JLU, Teen Titans, and other stuff). Literally fumbled all of this.
Not entirely their fault.
I have said it between this thread and western animation, but the mechanisms behind American nerd culture, especially comics/cartoons were (and largely still are) heavily outdated and restrictive compared to their Japanese counterparts. Toy companies operate in a 7-10 age range with strict sectioning of girl/boy for most things. DC had the misfortune of being largely ahead of the times amongst this, basically kneecapping themselves in the process.
They continuously got into fights with manufacturers who were unhappy with the older audiences that DC were bringing in through their cartoons. They were even more unhappy that, contradictory to what Nerdrotic and co say, women were large parts of DC’s 90s-10s audience makeup. Numerous concessions had to be made, like Batman Beyond being created as manufactures wanted Batman to be a teen to appeal to the youth for better toy sales, otherwise cancellation was immanent such as the case with Young Justice and its older skewing and nearly perfect 50% gender split. Other big hurdles like race also played a part as manufacturers won’t make merch for a series like Static Shock, despite it being one of the most popular Kids WB series after Pokémon.
DC had tons of bullshit thrusted on them. Wonder Woman projects largely got cancelled due to continuous pushback from toy companies because no female supers, two prominent cases being Star Riders in the early 90s and The Brave & The Bold successor series with a more 70s style WW.
DC with the movies seems like it did the 343 Halo thing where besides Snyder, no one actually likes the properties and actively held contempt for them.
A big problem with the movies, even dating back decades ago is DC consistently getting railroaded by critics and prior performances. Superman had two liked Donner films before the owning company decided to kill it by making things on the cheap. This caused Warner to course correct in the 90s with Superman Lives, a new darker take following the success of Burtonman that never took off. Then in the 2000s, they decided the previous failed, so go back to Donner but darker like Nolan, then that failed and was seen as too boring, not enough action. Snyder came as a result of Nolan and them needing more action, till his was seen as too dark and overly action-packed. Finally, we got Gunn to correct Snyder and make Superman more light-hearted. It is just a long series of pivots to correct things that plagues these films, with Batman arguably being much the same.
