Oh dear, this could all get very confusing (not least whether the plural of Superman should be Supermans or Supermen), but while revelations this weeks that Warner Bros was developing a Justice League movie led many to assume Henry Cavill would play Clark Kent in that after finishing up next year’s solo reboot, director Zack Snyder has come along to say that isn’t so. It suggests that we will have two separate film series with two separate Supermans running at the same time.
While promoting Sucker Punch, Snyder told HeyUGuys that, “Like what Christopher Nolan is doing and what I’m doing with Superman, what they’ll do with Justice League of America will be it’s own thing with it’s own Batman and own Superman. We’ll be over here with our movie and they’ll kinda get to do it twice which is kinda cool.”
And if they’re doing that, it would also appear that Christian Bale will end as Batman in 2012, followed by someone else playing the character in Justice League in 2013, while a completely separate reboot, with yet another actor in the lead, will appear shortly afterwards. That’s a whole lotta Batman.
Will audiences be fine with this, or will it all get too confusing? New Warner Bros president Jeff Robinov has used the precedent of Superman Returns being released while Smallville was on TV to say it should be fine having more than one version of a character in play at once (he said that specifically in relation to Wonder Woman being in both a Justice League film and a TV show that’s currently ramping up to air). However this would seem to go a lot further than that.
It’s a potentially risky strategy, but if done well, with interesting separate takes on these character, it could, as Snyder sayd, be kinda cool.