Chris Terrio On His Decision To Pen Justice League Part One And Why He May Not Return For Part Two

With screenwriting duties for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice behind him, Academy Award winning scribe Chris Terrio is now looking ahead to Justice League Part One. As is the case with many people taking on colossal projects, he wasn’t quite sure if he was the man for the job. In fact, it wasn’t until he saw a few talented actors bringing his words to life that he became convinced.

Terrio told the following to The Wall Street Journal:

I initially thought I wasn’t the guy to do Justice League and went off to work on something else. But the first day I went to the set, I saw Jesse [Eisenberg] in a scene with Holly Hunter and I really did feel like I was watching some strange, great performance in an independent film.

He then elaborated by saying how Justice League Part One will have a tonal difference from Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, as well as how the three films seemingly form a trilogy of sorts:

At that moment, I thought, “I’m not done with this yet. I want to go back and keep telling the story.” Batman v Superman is a bit of an Empire Strikes Back or Two Towers or any similar middle film in a trilogy. The middle film tends to be the darkest one. I do think from Man of Steel through Justice League, it is one saga really.

I expect Justice League will be tonally not quite as dark as Batman v Superman. From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit.

When asked if he will return for Justice League Part Two, he doesn’t deny that he will, but can’t confirm considering how much energy went into writing the first part:

I have written Justice League Part One, but I won’t necessarily write Part Two. This has been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life. For Batman v Superman, I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology. For Justice League, I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench.

If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies, I would say you were crazy. But I do think fans deserve that. I felt I owed the fan base all of my body and soul for two years because anything less wouldn’t have been appreciating the opportunity I had.

Justice League Part One arrives in theaters on November 17, 2017.