Zack Snyder may have used Superman’s origin story in Man of Steel to launch an entire shared universe, but it quickly became clear that he only viewed the Big Blue Boy Scout as a stepping stone to get to DC’s other marquee superhero.
A second solo outing for Henry Cavill’s Superman would have gone a long way to giving the early years of the DCEU some breathing space instead of rushing to establish a dense mythology as soon as possible, but based on the way Kal-El was sidelined in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice‘s theatrical cut, Snyder desperately wanted to get his hands on the Dark Knight as soon as possible.
Given how heavily the focus shifted to Ben Affleck’s Caped Crusader, you’d have thought that Batman was Snyder’s all-time favorite superhero, but in a recent interview, the 54 year-old revealed that one of the stars of his first DC adaptation actually holds that particular position.
“It’s gotta be Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen, I think. For me, he’s like this super cool, quantum superhero.”
You can understand why Snyder would hold one of the Watchmen so close to his heart, with the filmmaker being a longtime fan of the source material, not to mention the person that finally steered it out of development hell and brought Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal story to the big screen after the likes of Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass had all failed over the course of two decades.
Watchmen enjoys a solid reputation as either a cult classic or an ambitiously flawed misfire depending on what side of the divide you fall on, but it still seems surprising that a naked blue superhuman scientist would be Zack Snyder‘s all-time favorite when he’s spent almost a decade dealing with two of the medium’s biggest icons.
