Del Toro’s JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK Script Turned In

When movie studio executives take a break for a holiday, they still wind up doing a bit of work. And one thing that executives at Warner Brothers may have been doing over this Thanksgiving weekend is reading the screenplay for director Guillermo del Toro’s planned DC Comics movie that would explore the publisher’s more supernatural and mystical characters. Forbes is reporting that del Toro has just finished and submitted the screenplay – titled Dark Universe, though from what little we’ve heard it sounds similar in tone to DC’s current Justice League Dark comic series – right before the Thanksgiving holiday and is hoping to hear something back as early as this week.

And there are a number of things that would argue towards Warners letting del Toro do this film. First, he’s just rolling off his biggest hit ever with 2013’s Pacific Rim and there’s a solid fanbase anxious for more from the director. The TV series Constantine has been getting solid ratings for NBC and the only thing that has kept the network from giving the show a full 22-episode season is that it has too many hour-long dramas ready to go for the mid-season and they had to make the room on their schedule somehow. But people are familiar and responding well to the character, so it would make sense that the studio would want to try and capitalize on that. And even though del Toro stated he would be open to using TV Constantine Matt Ryan, Warners has shown that they don’t have any compunctions in recasting their superheroes if they’ve already appeared in a television incarnation.

If the film does go forward, it should be interesting to see how it merges, if at all, with the studio’s already announced plans for a shared universe based on DC Comics superheroes. Their already announced schedule, which runs through 2020, is rather light in terms of the supernatural superheroes that the company owns, with only Wonder Woman, whose origins are tied to the Greek gods, being represented on the schedule.