Yesterday afternoon, Variety broke the news that Michelle MacLaren is in the running to direct the first of Warner Bros.' planned Wonder Woman movies. MacLaren isn't exactly a household name—sadly, very few, if any, female directors are household names—but if you've been paying attention to anything even remotely resembling pop culture in the past few years, you've seen MacLaren's work. From Variety:

The studio also seems to be taking the same route as Universal did with Fifty Shades of Grey by hiring a female director to tackle the material given the strong independent woman at the center of it.

MacLaren has made her name for herself in TV over the past couple of years on shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad. Given the cinematic feeling each of her episodes gave off, it seemed only a matter of time before a movie studio gave her the opportunity to direct a tentpole pic.

On one hand, this is fantastic news for Wonder Woman; MacLaren's episodes of Game of Thrones, which are probably closest in tone to something like Wonder Woman, have been some of that series's best. (Here's a great interview with MacLaren and fellow Thrones director Alex Graves about the demanding process of shooting that series.)

On the other hand, this is fantastic news for mainstream film in general. Popular film is an arena that's depressingly dominated by white men—when Kathryn Bigelow won her best director Oscar for 2008's The Hurt Locker, it was, remarkably, the first time a woman had ever won the award. That's not because there aren't great contemporary women directors (off the top of my head, I can think of Nicole Holofcener, Lynn Shelton, Laura Poitras, and Lena Dunham). It is because big, slow, and risk-averse Hollywood studios—the ones that determine what 99.99 percent of people see when they go to the movies—are stubbornly resistant to change. Since white dudes have served them well in the past, white dudes keep getting more work. It's a bummer, but here's hoping that news of MacLaren possibly directing a huge superhero movie (not to mention the first huge superhero movie starring a woman) is a sign that things are beginning to change.