While we can thankfully say that the DC movie franchise is now back on track with Aquaman‘s ongoing success, the failure of 2017’s Justice League made it seem like it’d kill off the DCEU – or the Worlds of DC, as it’s now called – before it’d even properly begun. Given how much of a mess the production was, it’s generally agreed that Warner Bros. should have just waited until they were good and ready to make a great movie about the team.
Now, we’re learning that the studio only have themselves to blame on this front. Industry insider Neil Daly – who’s in charge of DC’s test screenings and reporting the audience’s reactions to execs – has revealed that it was WB who pushed director Zack Snyder to start work on Justice League immediately after finishing Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Daly says that Snyder felt that the formation of the super-team should be built up to with several solo films for the other heroes first. This is not to say that he had plans to direct these standalone movies, though, as Snyder was busy at the time working on his overarching storyline for the DCEU. Interestingly, Daly tells us that the filmmaker had a six movie plan for the franchise and not a five-part plan like we’ve been told about previously.
According to Daly, Snyder wanted to unfold his vision across Man of Steel, BvS, Justice League, Man of Steel 2, Justice League 2 and then a third Justice League that we didn’t previously know was discussed. However, presumably keen to not fall any further behind Marvel, WB insisted that the franchise skip the solo films and go straight to JL – a turn of events that resulted in Snyder being removed from the DC universe, with his planned sequels likely to never get made.
The ironic thing is that now WB’s returned to Snyder’s idea to focus on solo films for the individual heroes. After Aquaman, 2019 will bring us April’s Shazam! and Wonder Woman 1984 in June. And with any luck, they’ll continue to get this burgeoning cinematic universe back on track.
