by William Moon

NOTE: This article originally ran on scifigangstas.com in March 2021

Well, it’s come and gone. The once-mythic Snyder Cut has been released. At least some of us were caffeinated enough to slam through all four hours of it. (No judgment if you weren’t.) The film may or may not have been a success. It’s hard to say, really. Such is the reality of our Covid-affected, streaming service-dominated media landscape. While some die-hards are holding out hope that the “success” of this release, such as it is, will lead to a relaunching of the director’s DCEU, indications from Warner Brothers are that this is the end of the road for this particular iteration of the Justice League. Zack Snyder himself made statements to that effect in the weeks prior to his extended cut’s release, though it almost seemed like he was talking himself into hoping for a chance to direct sequels by the time the press tour was wrapping up. But, regardless, he’s got a different film premiering on Netflix soon (Army of the Dead starring Dave Bautista, which hits Netflix in May), and Warner/DC already have plans for several movies and HBO Max series in the near future (though, like everyone, they continue to slide their slate backwards due to Covid).

To follow up on my review of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, let’s now take a look at the larger DC film universe. Where will it go, i.e. what does Warner have up its sleeve currently? Where could it go, which is obviously murkier and more subjective? And what could it have been, which is mostly just a thought exercise on how this past 10-15 years could’ve played out on the DC side? Let’s start with the first of those questions, which has at least some definite answers.

The Immediate Future

The DCEU (DC Extended Universe) is the increasingly loosely defined series of films (with limited TV series coming soon) that essentially started with 2013’s Man of Steel and has included every major DC movie released since then…kind of. While things seemed to start off in a fairly focused way, the lack of immediate, overwhelming success caused second-guessing and hedging from the studio pretty much right after 2016’s Batman v Superman was released to a critical thrashing and a sizable but still underwhelming box office gross. The long and winding road that led to the release of 2017’s woefully underperforming Justice League is well-documented, but if anything, it’s the success of Wonder Woman, released earlier that year, that really muddies the water, as it would’ve been pretty easy for DC/Warner to scuttle the whole SnyderVerse back in 2017 had WW not been such a major critical and commercial success. Instead, we’ve seen a series of mostly successful, largely standalone DC films since, with both 2018’s Aquaman and 2019’s Joker (which isn’t meaningfully connected to the DCEU at all) hitting the magic billion-dollar mark. Shazam!, also released in 2019, was reasonably successful on a fairly manageable budget (by comic book movie standards), and DC seemed to have generated some momentum.

But in an entertainment world dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its numerous big crossover smashes and multi-phase Infinity Gauntlet storyline, there’s still a sense that DC is a rudderless ship. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman have connected with audiences in a way perhaps Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman didn’t, at least judging by revenue generated. So, while Affleck has mostly ceded the cape and cowl to Robert Pattinson and Cavill’s involvement in future DC projects appears to be an open question, it’s seems unlikely that at least Gadot or Momoa are going anywhere soon. That would appear to indicate that no further Justice League films are in the offing, and perhaps would imply that none likely will be until a complete reboot and recasting of the major heroes is done. But that’s just pure speculation. Marvel has recast heroes and soldiered on before (notably replacing Terrence Howard as War Machine with Don Cheadle for Iron Man 2, though that was before the MCU had even begun to crawl, much less sprint towards multiplex domination. The franchise now faces its thorniest recasting/retooling question yet with the unexpected and tragic death of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman). And even with these questions, there are yet further questions and possibilities still sitting out there, some of which will be addressed in the below list of scheduled future DC releases.

• The Suicide Squad – August 2021 – out of the gate first will be James Gunn’s soft reboot of the horribly misguided Suicide Squad from 2016. Gunn’s recent Marvel track record with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, plus a strong and deep cast, makes this perhaps the most promising upcoming release DC has on its ledger. And in a way, how Gunn and the studio handled the casting here could be instructive for they handle the casting or recasting of their bigger name superheroes – some of the cast from the first film (Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, and Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang) are returning, while Gunn was able to recruit the likes of Idris Elba, John Cena, Sylvester Stallone, and frequent Gunn collaborators Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, and Sean Gunn to flesh out the roster. (A whole lot more people are in this, including some fairly big names, but most of them are probably going to die right away, likely in humorous ways. So let’s not get too attached.) A rad new trailer was just released, and it’s very King Sharky.

• The Batman – March 2022 – like Joker, this film isn’t technically part of the DCEU, as we’re getting yet another full reboot of the character with Matt Reeves stepping behind the camera and Robert Pattinson taking over as Bruce Wayne. After a few Covid delays, principal photography has apparently wrapped and the film looks set for release early next year. This project is taking its cues largely from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s enjoyable The Long Halloween comic series, which already was a foundational influence on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and especially The Dark Knight. Where it seems the parts of TLH that deal with organized crime and the rise of supervillains – along with the triumvirate of Batman, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon – were major influences on Nolan, Reeves will work more with the serial killer detective story at the comic series’ heart (with Paul Dano’s Riddler being heavily implied to be the culprit), with some of the organized crime stuff still in play (John Turturro is here as Carmine Falcone and an unrecognizable Colin Farrell will have a small role as the Penguin, looking more like a mob boss than, say, Danny DeVito’s Batman Returns incarnation). I also suspect that the events of The Flash will loosely retcon this movie into a larger continuity somehow.

• Black Adam – July 2022 – Filming for this endlessly gestating project has now begun (just this past week) and now The Rock has decreed that BA will finally hit theaters next summer. Fun fact – Dwayne Johnson was cast as Black Adam in September 2014, which is even before the long-delayed Flash movie was announced. We’ll finally, hopefully, get to see the big man in the black spandex of Teth-Adam next year, and the movie apparently is also going to introduce the Justice Society of America as well (Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate!), taking its cue from the character’s association with that team during his post-Infinite Crisis antihero phase, with “antihero” being the general vibe DC seems to be shooting for here.

• The Flash – November 2022 – this movie was first announced way back in 2014 with a release date set for 2018. The many, many, many delays to this project (along with it being developed during a time when The Flash TV series was a major ratings success for the CW and a linchpin of TV’s Arrowverse) have arguably made this the poster child for the DCEU’s lack of direction. After what’s at least the fourth change of director, It‘s Andy Muschietti is now set to helm a film that will apparently rip the idea of cinematic DC multiverse wide open. Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert’s lousy Flashpoint comic will serve as the main inspiration for the storyline, with both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck returning as their respective incarnations of Batman, with newcomer Sasha Calle also cast in the role of Supergirl. This movie is likely to be bonkers (which is actually probably a good thing for a Flash movie) and is also supposed to reset the DCEU entirely, which could provide some in-universe answers to some of the questions posed in this article. Now let’s see if it actually finally happens.

• Aquaman 2 – December 2022 – slated to come out only about a month after The Flash (?), James Wan’s follow-up to his mega-successful first superhero outing seems likely to be a slam-dunk hit. Star Jason Momoa apparently pitched the story for this movie (and possibly future sequels) while filming the first entry. Both of Aquaman‘s major villains, Patrick Wilson’s Ocean Master and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Black Manta, are due to return, but no word on if another major villain will be involved (the end of the first film seemed to imply Ocean Master, at least, wouldn’t be a major adversary again at least for a little while). The only news on this front lately was a rumor that Amber Heard had been fired as Mera, but that was refuted by her reps shortly after it came up.

• Shazam! Fury of the Gods – June 2023 – my favorite DCEU movie so far is Shazam!, and I’m very intrigued to see where the story goes from here. (Who wouldn’t be after getting a Mr. Mind tease?) Again, not much is known about the plot yet, though you would assume Mr. Mind’s Monster Society of Evil will factor in somehow. Filming apparently starts this coming May. (And they just cast Helen Mirren!)

Those are the movies that are firmly in some phase of production. You can add to that list The Peacemaker, an HBO Max series that’s also firmly in production and which centers on the character John Cena’s playing in The Suicide Squad. It’s set to hit the streaming service next year.

Beyond that, there’s a metric buttload of movies that are listed as “in development”. Some of these seem likely to actually get made (we’ll list those first), and some others currently exist only as whispers on the wind.

• Wonder Woman 3 – or whatever it will end up being called. The reception to Wonder Woman 1984 was a bit more muted than perhaps DC was looking for, but this still should be looked at as the surest thing out of all the projects in this section. The project was fast-tracked back in December, and Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins are signed on.

• Blackhawk – no less than Steven Spielberg is currently attached to this project, about an ace fighter pilot squadron in World War II (at least that’s normally what Blackhawk is about). Apparently he was going to make this movie back around 1980 with Dan Aykroyd attached to star, but decided to scrap it and make Raiders of the Lost Ark instead. That’s kind of a nuts anecdote. Anyway, he’s supposed to direct this film after he gets done with his West Side Story remake.

• Blue Beetle – a feature film about the more recent Jamie Reyes incarnation of the character is being developed and will apparently begin filming later this year under the direction of Angel Manuel Soto.

• Supergirl – the casting of Sasha Calle in the role for The Flash seems to indicate this movie will soon follow, but no official greenlight exists for this that I know of.

• Superman – this is the project recently announced with JJ Abrams on board as a producer and the acclaimed journalist and comic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates as screenwriter. It hasn’t been officially announced that the film will focus on a black Superman, but that’s currently the expectation. I don’t expect Henry Cavill to be involved in any capacity, but that’s also officially to be determined.

• Zatanna – Zatanna would be a good character to get the spotlight in an upcoming live-action project, and from our lips to Grodd’s ears apparently, as Emerald Fennell (who wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated Promising Young Woman and also played Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown) has been signed on to write the script for a film featuring the DC magician.

• New Gods – Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Ava DuVernay is still lined up to helm a movie based on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World characters. This was announced years ago and had appeared to disappear into the ether, but DuVernay referenced continued work on the project on multiple occasions last year.

• Hourman – a recently-announced project, a feature film about the relatively obscure Justice Society member Hourman is apparently now in the works. I would assume the character will also appear with the rest of the JSA in Black Adam, but assumptions like that are dangerous in regards to the DCEU.

• Static Shock – Michael B. Jordan, who was at one point floated as being involved in a Superman project as a potential producer/star, is attached in some capacity in the development of a film featuring Static. This is another fairly recent announcement with little other information having been revealed thus far.

• Plastic Man – a comic film focusing on the super-stretchy Plastic Man has been floated for a couple of years now, with a new screenwriter being hired late last year to potentially change this to a female-led project. I would guess that means we’ll see Plastic Woman if and when, but currently the project is still slated as Plastic Man.

There are several others listed in development, including the Aquaman horror spinoff The Trench (about the fish monsters from near the end of that movie), The Amazons, and several planned spinoffs from Suicide Squad that likely won’t ever be made (or were smushed into Birds of Prey). Also, remember Joss Whedon’s Batgirl project? Yikes.

And beyond all these movies, there are likely to be many more shows on HBO Max, with the forever-in-the-works Justice League Dark movie apparently heading there eventually as a series, but with all of the team members likely getting their own series ahead of time. A John Constantine show that involves neither Keanu Reeves (from the dopey 2005 movie) nor Matt Ryan (from the previous Constantine show and then later the Arrowverse) looks like it’ll be first up. (There’s also a forthcoming Green Lantern show on HBO Max, which isn’t part of the Arrowverse, but looks like it’ll be in the universe with Titans and Doom Patrol…or maybe not. It’s hard to keep track. It won’t be part of the DCEU at any rate, even though it morphed out of the Green Lantern DCEU movie that never got going.)

Got all that? There will be a test later.

Imaginary Stories – The Future

There’s quite a bit in that previous section that may wind up being just as likely to ever actually exist as anything I’m about to toss out (i.e. <1% of chance of it happening), but let’s for now count all the above projects as real and engage in some rank speculation of our own.

First, let’s look at the future. Gaze into the crystal ball and try to see beyond the stack of movies and shows listed above. (This may be difficult. There are a lot of them.) Where are things headed in the larger sense? Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman are DC feature players in pretty much any scenario, but keeping them makes it at least somewhat narratively weird if you want to try another shared universe crossover film in the future. And with a new Batman on the way and apparently a new Superman (but also Ben Affleck Bat-suiting up one more time and Henry Cavill in kind of a Hollywood Phantom Zone vis-à-vis the Superman role), the outlook is extra cloudy when it comes to another Justice League.

What’s the long-term plan? For now, Warner seems content to just focus on individual movies and more or less see what sticks (“sticks” in this sense usually means at least $1 billion worldwide). That’s not an awful strategy, per se, as it should be noted that only really Marvel has managed to crack this whole shared universe thing. Star Wars tried to do too much too fast after The Force Awakens’ runaway success (and may be about to make the same mistake again with its upcoming glut of Disney+ series), Universal has tried repeatedly to launch a mega-franchise based off its classic horror movie characters to no avail (i.e. The Wolfman, Dracula Untold, and the Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy), Sony kept wanting to create a shared universe just out of Spider-Man but had to eventually give up the ghost and go crawling back to Disney/Marvel, and on and on. Even apparent slam dunks like “let’s make a Fast and Furious movie just with The Rock and Jason Statham and not those other chumps” didn’t rake in the money the way you would expect. Warner has kind of successfully launched its MonsterVerse with Godzilla and King Kong, but it’s really just been a series of Toho Studios monsters plus Kong thrown in there. (Godzilla vs. Kong opens tomorrow in the US and on HBO Max and is having to withstand an organized review-bombing campaign from SnyderVerse die-hards.)

So, with all that said, DC’s in a holding pattern for now. They have their big batch of possible projects to greenlight, but a clear plan going forward a la Kevin Feige’s plan for Marvel doesn’t appear to be in place. Going back to the list of known upcoming projects, it looks as though the success of The Batman and The Flash may hold the keys to the kingdom. The Batman‘s importance is clear – Batman has been DC’s feature film bell cow since 1989, and even if this is, like, the 30th different take on the character, successfully relaunching the Dark Knight back onto our screens is always a priority for Warner/DC. He’s the surest thing they’ve got, maybe the surest thing in all of movie franchise land (give or take a James Bond). The Flash, though, is a different matter entirely. That’s the film where the on and off-screen messiness of DC’s world-building could be addressed, paving the in-universe way for Ben Affleck to potentially give way to Robert Pattinson, Henry Cavill to potentially give way to whoever gets cast as Superman in the next project, possibly open the door to new versions of Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Cyborg (Ray Fisher is open to returning to the role, but his relationship with WB is obviously terribly strained right now), and whoever else DC wants to keep while retaining Gadot, Momoa, Zachary Levi’s Shazam, and Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam (and Ezra Miller’s Flash presumably). There’s a lot of ways this could go wrong and it’s a hell of a lot to put on a movie that’s already burned through a metric buttload of potential writers and directors, but I have to think this is the plan.

After that, who the hell knows? We’re presuming quite a bit by this point already (that The Batman is a huge success, that The Flash is actually a good movie while also handling the tricky plotting of a multiverse movie, that nothing else strange or scandalous happens between now and then). But if Warner’s looking for a quick way to reopen the possibility of having an actual good, money-making Justice League movie that isn’t a post-production hatchet job or a four-hour fever dream, this is probably the shortest path from our current point A to that hypothetical point B.

Imaginary Stories – The Past

OK, that’s (maybe) the future sorted. Now, just for the hell of it, let’s turn our attention to the past, or at least a possible past – a timeline where it was DC who got their s**t together back in the halcyon 2008-2010 days and established a working shared universe, not Marvel. I could (and perhaps someday will) go back over just how unlikely it is that Marvel’s reached this point, pointing out the myriad ways it could’ve gone wrong and sunk the whole enterprise, but didn’t. Hell, you could argue that DC should’ve had an easier time launching their own mega-franchise back then anyway, since they had a genre-redefining Batman-starring franchise in full swing and didn’t have several key characters already sold off to rival studios. Marvel wasn’t even part of the Disney behemoth back in those days. Paramount and Universal distributed those early MCU entries before the Mouse House gobbled the then-independent Marvel Studios up. (The deal was signed in 2009, but Disney didn’t distribute an MCU movie until 2012’s The Avengers.)

Much as they would mistakenly attempt to do a few years down the road, DC and Warner went into production on a Justice League film without having set up all the necessary characters first. That project (Justice League: Mortal, which would’ve been helmed by Mad Max franchise director George Miller) died on the vine and now exists only as a bonkers anecdote. So let’s take a look at a world where, circa 2008, DC figures out how to launch its own shared universe and what that could’ve looked like.

Just borrowing from the MCU’s phases idea, imagine a first phase with intros for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and maybe Shazam in solo films, with characters like Martian Manhunter and maybe Cyborg appearing as well. You could also possibly argue for two Batman and Superman films each. Throughout, you develop the various rogues galleries enough where a credible Legion of Doom/Injustice League/Secret Society of Supervillains-type deal gathers together and acts as the antagonists in a first crossover film (some kind of riff on Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and Doug Braithwaite’s Justice could be a way to look at this story). Then that movie could’ve teased the existence of the New Gods and Apokolips, with the coming of Darkseid flowing through the second phase and a much less bonkers riff on Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis being the second crossover film. And then a final phase could’ve potentially taken cues from the Green Lantern epic Blackest Night as a possible storyline, with a crossover film dealing with the rise of what are essentially zombie versions of all the characters who’ve died throughout the franchise. Those are the broad points, and you could easily have flipped the Blackest Night and Darkseid phases and built up to the Dark Lord for the big ending movie, kind of like Marvel did with Thanos (though their franchise isn’t ending, just changing). Along the way, various side areas of the DC Universe could’ve been brought in, with the Suicide Squad being built up through a mixture of defeated villains and minor off-screen characters, a version of the Justice League Dark filtering in to some of the stories as side characters before getting their own film, and the development of many secondary heroes throughout (obviously Robin, but also other Amazons, Queen Mera, Steel, Green Arrow, Black Canary, maybe something like the Doom Patrol if they were feeling frisky. Building up to a Teen Titans movie with Deathstroke would’ve been fun, too.)

All this would’ve likely required the terrible 2011 Green Lantern film to not exist (no big loss there) and probably a new Batman even closer on the heels of The Dark Knight trilogy, but this is just a thought exercise. Many of the same elements that we’ve seen DC establish or talk about establishing over the years (the League of Assassins as a tie-in to Batman’s origin, having Year One and The Long Halloween influence the tone of Gotham City, setting up Sinestro as a good guy in a first Green Lantern movie before his betrayal, always leaving Flashpoint as an angle to address any narrative changes mid-stream and establish something like a multiverse) could’ve stood as solid building blocks. There’s even a ready-made Civil War-type of film if you really wanted to get into that kind of storytelling, with Mark Waid and Howard Porter’s JLA: Tower of Babel storyline just sitting there. Also with Marvel setting up their own take on Secret Invasion in their Disney+ shows (and possibly the next Captain Marvel film), DC could’ve easily used the White Martians for much the same surprise purpose. It was all there, just as it’s all still there. I doubt we’ll ever see such an ambitious plan come to fruition, and perhaps Warner would be better served at this point not to try, but they could’ve done it. 2019 could’ve just as easily seen Batman and Darkseid kill each other as the dramatic climax of a decade-plus of movies as it did Iron Man and Thanos. And everything DC’s done in the past decade and through the next one will have to exist in the shadow of that failure. How they react to knowing what they’ve missed out on will shape how successful they’re going to be in the future. And that future is…promising…?