Warner Bros Games has shut down 30 year-old studio Monolith Productions and cancelled its in-development Wonder Woman videogame.
Four years after it was first announced, a Wonder Woman videogame has been cancelled by its publisher, Warner Bros Games. The company has also closed the studio behind it, Monolith Productions, it has now been confirmed.
In a statement published by Kotaku, the Warner Bros described this as a “strategic change in direction”:
“We have had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises – Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC, and Game Of Thrones.”
As well as Monolith, two other studios are to close as part of this direction change: Player First Games, developer of Multiversus, and Warner Bros Games San Diego.
A free-to-play fighting game launched in May 2024, Multiversus' shutdown was announced in January, and the game will be discontinued altogether in May. It was one of several high-profile financial disappointments for Warner Bros Games in recent months, with the company announcing last November that it had lost around $100m on the online brawler.
In early February, it was reported that Warner Bros Games had also invested around $100m in Monolith’s Wonder Woman game, with one iteration of the game scrapped and development restarted over its four-year production.
Monolith’s closure is particularly dramatic given it’s long history. Founded over 30 years ago, it landed a major hit in 2005 with the innovative horror shooter F.E.A.R. In 2014, it launched Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor, an acclaimed action-adventure with an ingenious system, dubbed Nemesis, which saw in-game characters remember player actions and appear to bear grudges over the deaths of their allies.
Later patented, the Nemesis system was said to have made an appearance in an early iteration of Wonder Woman before the project was shifted to a more linear structure.
Warner Bros Games glancingly addressed Monolith’s long, respected history as a development studio in its statement.
“The development of Monolith’s Wonder Woman videogame will not move forward,” it read. “Our hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities. This is another tough decision, as we recognise Monolith’s storied history of delivering epic fan experiences through amazing games.”
Unfortunately, solemn statements are of little comfort to the dozens of people who will soon lose their jobs. Writing on BlueSky, Jennifer Allaway, a senior writer who was working on Wonder Woman, wrote in the wake of the news, “I am heartbroken. We were making something so beautiful, y’all. I’m out of a job and I’m having a baby in ten weeks. I’m terrified.”
