After this past weekend’s double shot of bad news for Warner Brothers’s DC Comics Extended Universe – the departure of The Flash director Seth Grahame-Smith and other creative tensions within the franchise – I think that we can all use some positive news about the franchise.
According to a report that surface this weekend, the aim of the the script that actor/writer/director Ben Affleck has been working with DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns is tell the ultimate Batman story. To that end –
Many, if not most, members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery will be making appearances in the film. It’s going to be crammed with Bat villains, which means that just about every major bad guy you’ve ever wanted to see in a movie will be in this movie.
It should be noted that all of this past weekend’s DC Comics film news is coming from the same source – Birth.Movies.Death and its founder Devin Faraci. So equal weight should be given to all three stories when one is evaluating their reliability. I know that there will be some fans out there who will be quick to dismiss the more negative stories that were reported simply because they don’t want them to be true but will embrace the numerous Batman villains story because it sounds like something they would like.
Faraci also dismisses the idea that Afflecks’ film will be based on the comic book story line Under The Red Hood, probably because it has some superficial similarities to the Winter Soldier character currently driving the action in Marvel Studios’s Captain America: Civil War. I am perfectly fine with that. In fact, I will go one step further and say that I hope that Affleck and Johns are not drawing heavily from any previous iteration of a Batman story, be it having been told in the comics or video games. It was Zack Snyder’s insistence in pulling elements from a number of different, unrelated Superman stories for his Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice that makes the film feel like a Mulligan’s stew of ideas that doesn’t quite come together.
So how does a Batman film have a number of villains in it and still be good when it seems from past experience the more villains that get crammed into a Batman the worse it gets? (Yes Joel Schumacher, we’re looking at you.)
Well according to Faraci most of these villains will probably only be appearing in cameo roles and speculates that there may be a sequence set in Arkham Asylum, Gotham City’s psychiatric dumping ground for all of its deranged villains. I posit that perhaps that a number of these villains could also appear in some sort of montage. A dream sequence is not entirely out of the question, either, given that Batman’s dream life is taking on an important role in these films if Batman V Superman is anything to go by.
I suppose that as the casting process for the film begins to gear we may start to get a better idea of this all may shake out. Of course, since we still don’t yet when Warner Brothers wants to release this film we can’t even guess as to when that will be.
