Gal Gadot says nobody at DC Studios formally told her she had been dropped as Wonder Woman.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor who starred in two solo Wonder Woman films for director Patty Jenkins revealed that James Gunn and Peter Safran once assured her a third instalment was in development with her in the lead. Then the studio's new leadership dismantled the old DC universe around her, and the phone stopped ringing.

"They were like, 'We're going to develop it with you, the third one,'" Gadot said on the podcast. "But I saw the way everybody else was handled, right? And I, you know – the Henry [Cavill] situation was unfortunate. I was in the middle of that. The Henry situation was not handled elegantly, to say the least. Same with Patty – it was not handled elegantly."

The comments, reported by The Hollywood Reporter, offer the most direct account yet of how Gadot learned her tenure as Diana Prince had ended — not through an official announcement, but through watching the collapse of the DC Extended Universe from the inside.

There was never going to be a painless way to break up the old DC roster. Warner Bros' DC Extended Universe arguably needed to be ripped apart to make room for Gunn and Peter Safran's entirely new DCU. A clean break from Ben Affleck's Batman and Henry Cavill's Superman made sense, if only to convince audiences that a genuine reboot was underway.

The harder question — one Gadot may have been pondering this week — is why some of the old universe's supporting players were carried safely into the new continuity while others were left amid the ruins. Gadot's Wonder Woman stands out as one of the DCEU's few unambiguous successes, both commercially and critically, which makes the decision to quietly retire her all the more puzzling.

Gadot's account also casts light on the treatment of her collaborators. Henry Cavill's exit as Superman, announced and then reversed in public fits and starts, drew criticism at the time. Patty Jenkins, whose Wonder Woman (2017) remains one of the franchise's high points, similarly saw her third film fall away without what Gadot describes as elegant handling.

For Gunn and Safran, who took charge of DC Studios with a mandate to rebuild the franchise from the ground up, the episode highlights the human cost of a hard reset. Gadot was not the biggest casualty of the transition — Affleck and Cavill carried more iconic roles — but she may be the one whose dismissal least matches her box-office record.

Whether the new DCU can generate Wonder Woman-sized successes without Gadot, and whether Jenkins ever returns to the property, will be one measure of whether the ruthless clean break pays off.