Despite being around for over seven years, the DCEU has announced just as many projects that never made it out of development hell as it has actual movies. It took Warner Bros.’ shared mythology a long time to settle on a creative direction and that led to numerous titles like Green Lantern Corps, Gotham City Sirens, Nightwing, Ben Affleck’s The Batman and many more quickly stagnating before disappearing from memory entirely.
Justice League was initially announced as the first of a two-part saga, but as we all know, some serious behind the scenes turmoil plagued the DCEU’s all-star epic. Joss Whedon essentially reshot the entire movie at the request of the studio following Zack Snyder’s departure, which led to such a sustained level of backlash from fans that the 300 director was eventually invited back into the fold to finally complete his original vision.
Four and a half years after he first called action, Snyder is now back at work on the set of Justice League, and based on what we know so far, the HBO Max exclusive miniseries is shaping up to be unrecognizable from the maligned theatrical edition. There’ve been constant rumors that if the new take on the material proves successful enough, the studio could hand the filmmaker the keys to a standalone sequel, and in a recent interview, the 54 year-old teased that he’s already got a follow-up mapped out in his head.
“If you said to any of the actors in the movie, ‘Well what happens in the movie?’, or, ‘What happens later?’, or whatever for any movie. And they go, ‘Well, I got the script and it’s cool and I kind of know this’. So Ray Porter and I were talking about this and what’s cool or what’s the right response to some questions. It’s a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that, did I write and did I have and do I know what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is would be exciting, I think that’s a fine thing.”
If Zack Snyder’s Justice League lives up to the hype and its reputation as one of the most highly anticipated comic book blockbusters in recent memory, then it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that a direct continuation of the story will be given the green light. After all, as we’ve seen countless times over the last few months, anything is possible in the DCEU these days.