Sony has acquired the rights to Professor Marston & The Wonder Woman, a biographical feature film about William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.  The independently-produced film is already in production.  Written and directed by Angela Robinson, it stars Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, and Bella Heathcote in a film that explores the origins of the feminist superhero and the unconventional menage a trois formed by Marston, his wife Elizabeth, and a former student Olive Byrne.

Marston, who also invented the polygraph, fathered children by both women, and after he died in 1947, the women continued to live together and raise their children.  Obviously Professor Marston and The Wonder Woman will be a very different sort of “superhero film,” an adult drama with special emphasis on the feminist ideas behind Wonder Woman, as well as on her creator’s unconventional lifestyle.  Perhaps it will even touch on Marston’s interest in “bondage,” which was certainly evident in the early years of Wonder Woman comics.

According to Deadline, the ways in which Marston, who was a high profile Harvard psychology professor, was able to keep his domestic life a secret during an era in which exposure would have had serious consequences, will be a focus of the film as well.  No release date has been set yet for Professor Marston & The Wonder Woman, but with Warner Bros. preparing to launch a big budget Wonder Woman film next summer (see “Wonder Woman Film Will Be an Origin Saga”), don’t be surprised if Sony launches its biopic in close proximity to the release of the Wonder Woman movie.