With a filmography that included writing or story credits on the Blade and Dark Knight trilogies, as well as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, it was understandable that Warner Bros. would turn to comic book adaptation veteran and Christopher Nolan collaborator David S. Goyer to play a part in crafting the DCEU.
Alongside the aforementioned filmmaker and Zack Snyder, the three ended up putting their heads together and playing pivotal roles in the conception, construction, and execution of both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it wasn’t long before the studio got a little too involved.
The franchise has been lurching from one crisis to the next for what feels like forever, with Goyer revealing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that one of the biggest issues was the revolving door of executives continually demanding that the gap be narrowed with Marvel.
“I know the pressure we were getting from Warner Bros., which was, ‘We need our MCU! We need our MCU!’ And I was like let’s not run before we walk. The other thing that was difficult at the time was there was this revolving door of executives at Warner Bros. and DC. Every 18 months someone new would come in. We were just getting whiplash. Every new person was like, ‘We’re going to go bigger!’ I remember at one point the person running Warner Bros. at the time had this release that pitched the next 20 movies over the next 10 years. But none of them had been written yet! It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air… This is not how you build a house.”
The irony is that the DCEU dies off in December with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom having never come close to catching the MCU, which unfortunately places even more pressure on James Gunn’s creative rejig to succeed.