When I covered the news that WB would be relaunching their Justice League film, the assumption was that it would relaunch Batman, while maintaining the momentum from Snyder’s Superman and Campbell’s Green Lantern.
NOPE.
Speaking with HeyUGuys.Uk Snyder made it very clear that his Superman and Nolan’s Batman exist in their own isolated universe, and that the WB Justice League will be its own contained thing with its own Batman and Superman. So the Batman reboot is still true, but the other stuff is now out the window. While assumptions have already done that thing they do to you and me on this subject, one presumes this applies to Green Lantern as well. It better.
I mentioned in the previous coverage my need for this kind of shit to cleanly align in a logical, consistent fashion. With that in mind, this seems kind of dumb. The chance of WB actually releasing a Justice League film in 2013 is very small, so I don’t understand why an effort wouldn’t be made to unify their releases. Without even touching on the public’s theoretical inability to understand two different actors playing Superman in movies at roughly the same time, it just seems weirdly messy to me. The idea of it is like nails on a chalkboard to my left-brained sensibilities. The thing is, that’s entirely my own hang-up, and I’m fully prepared to eat three courses of crow if this works out.
It’s possible to reconcile this decision with even my finicky bullshit instincts, if the film is entirely self-contained, meaning it doesn’t allude to any of the other films, and has its own clear, distinctive approach to these heroes. Even then, that will mean some of the solo franchises like Flash and Wonder Woman will sync up with the team-up universe, and others like Superman and Batman won’t. Gross. Part of the reason Harry Potter has worked so well has been the visual consistency, the reatined cast, and that any shifts were done at logical points in logical ways (the shift from a dead Richard Harris to Michael Gambon came at the perfect point, for example). Warner Brothers treating its other potentially major shared universe so haphazardly isn’t a move I would have predicted, so I hope Robinov knows just what it is he’s doing. If he’s that dedicated to a Justice League movie in 2013, I guess this is really the only way to do it.
Check out Syder’s statement below, and let me know what you think of this new development. It’s about men both Bat and Super, so I know you have an opinion. Light up the message boards or dump something in the comments!
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(via IndieWire)