Superhero movie fans have been watching Warner Brothers for some time now, wondering if the studio will ever get the long in-development Justice League film in front of cameras. But Guillermo del Toro has a vision for another team of DC Comics heroes, one that is a little darker.
Calling the project Heaven Sent, Del Toro has pitched to the studio the idea of a superteam made up of some of DC’s more mystical heroes including John Constantine, The Spectre, The Phantom Stranger, Deadman, Swamp Thing, Zatanna, Sargon and Etrigan the Demon. Del Toro made the pitch to Warners after impressing the brass with his work on the upcoming giant monsters and robots film Pacific Rim.
Now, if you’re a regular DC Comics reader like I am, you are already probably thinking that this idea sounds similar to the publisher’s Justice League Dark title, a team book that features some of the same characters banding together to defeat some of the darker, more mystical threats to the world. (A point lost on a number of sites reporting the news, by the way.) I would imagine that if the long-in-gestation Justice League movie starts shaping up that Warners would definitely be interested in pursuing the idea.
Latino Review states that the Warners currently has their legal department looking into the rights situation to all the characters as a first step in testing the feasibility of moving forward on the project. That does seem odd to me though, considering that the studio had been doing much to pull any film rights to their characters back over the past couple of years. I would think that they should have a tighter rein on this at this point.
Del Toro is a noted comics and horror fan and his two adaptations of the horror comic Hellboy shows that he can handle this type of material with flair. And I seem to recall that he worked on a developing a Deadman solo film a few years back.
But I would take this with a rather large grain of salt, though. The report came as part of a five item post at Latino Review about various comic book-related film and television projects. One of the other items concerning the Powers TV series in development at the FX network has already been debunked by the comics creator and show’s executive producer Brian Michael Bendis.
Additionally, Del Toro constantly has a number of projects in development at any one time and not all of them come to fruition. Time will tell if this one does.
