Comic books have a lot of lame villains. Both Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four fought a guy called Paste Pot Pete who had a glue gun, sort of like if your mom decided to start robbing banks using only the things she took with her to scrapbooking class. Because of the nature of comics, there have only been a handful of successful new characters since the Silver Age of the 1960s, so these lame old comic book characters tend to get reinvented from time to time, and some of them become successful.
One of those characters is The Cheetah, Wonder Woman’s mortal enemy. Turns out the bench for Wonder Woman villains is not particularly deep once you use Ares and eliminate everything that’s just a part of her creator William Moulton Marston’s bondage fetish. The leftovers are basically Doctor Psycho, a misogynist con man and Cheetah, a women who turns into a catgirl.
Guess which one is going to be in the Winder Woman sequel. Doctor Psycho seems a little too on the nose with Donald Trump being president and all, so it’s going to be Cheetah. And you can believe those weirdos in the fur suits are going to be pleased about that. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kristen Wiig is going to be the actress fielding a lot of disturbing questions involving the word “yif” at Comic-Con.
If you want to know the history of this character, well, get in line because everything about DC Comics is incredibly convoluted due to DC’s multitude of reboots and soft relaunches. Cheetah has five different origin stories, which range from her being a socialite in a cheetah costume to a woman cursed to transform into a literal man-eating cheetah person because the African ritual that gave her the powers of a cheetah is punishing her for not being a virgin. Only in comic books will slut-shaming result in cannibalism.
In her most recent incarnation, Cheetah is Barbara Minerva, an archeologist and friend of Wonder Woman who is tricked into becoming Cheetah by Veronica Cale, a sort of female Lex Luthor-character introduced into Wonder Woman comics about a decade ago. As Cheetah, she blames Wonder Woman for her transformation into a cannibal were-cat and joins forces with Cale to be a villain, even though it’s obviously Cale’s fault and Minerva is supposed to be a genius. That’s probably the version they’ll go with in the movie, and if it comes out soon enough they might not have rebooted her again in the comics yet.
Like the upcoming X-Men film X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the Wonder Woman sequel will be set in the 1980s. That way you can copy the soundtrack to Guardians of the Galaxy without it seeming too incongruous to the story.