You would hardly have known that this week saw the death of DC’s extended universe, AKA the Snyderverse. A new report in Variety focuses in on the revelation, detailed in freshly released documents from last year’s Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial, that the latter felt she was being pushed out of her role as Mera in the upcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom by none other than Jason Momoa, the king of Atlantis himself. The article goes on to detail how Heard was eventually allowed to retain the role after her then-boyfriend Elon Musk had one of his legal team send a “scorched-earth letter to Warner Bros threatening to burn the house down” if she was fired.
This, of course, is all the salacious stuff, gleaned from notes taken from Heard’s therapist, Dr Dawn Hughes, which were never meant for public consumption and have only seen the light of day because fans of Depp paid for the court to release them. And it has naturally been picked up across the media. But buried in a much later paragraph is confirmation that the longest goodbye in comic book movie history has finally reached its finale. Reports Variety: “None of the stars cast by Zack Snyder for 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and 2017’s Justice League – including Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller and Momoa — will reprise their roles in the new DC universe in character.”
Remarkable. Despite the recent introduction of a multiverse in Andy Muschietti’s unfairly maligned The Flash, which would have allowed Warner to pick and choose which superheroes turned up in its new reality, the new James Gunn-led DC Universe will not feature anyone from the DCEU.
This is perhaps understandable, given Ezra Miller’s recent, highly-publicised travails, the rude but reasonable dropping of Cavill, and Affleck’s decidedly mixed reception as the dark knight. But where is Gunn going to find a better Diana of Themyscira than Gal Gadot? And is there any point watching The Flash again, when it seems the alternate reality where Miller’s Barry Allen finds himself in the movie’s denouement (apologies if this is a spoiler for anyone) is not one we’ll ever be seeing at the multiplex?
Do studios that ask us to invest our time in these complex, ever-expanding macro-sagas have a responsibility to ensure that the story continues to unfurl, even if the timeline shifts and Superman is suddenly played by a different actor who wears his pants on the inside? I’m not saying I really want to see a new DC reality in which Miller carries on and George Clooney returns as Batman, but it would have been nice to think that somebody somewhere had a plan to move smoothly from one superhero era to the next.
Perhaps this is a moot point, given that only recently the idea of Hollywood making anything more than a trilogy of films that sat together as a coherent whole was almost unheard of. But given The Flash was such an obvious – in my view intelligently conceived – jumping-off point into the new Gunnoverse, did it really have to end up this way?
Instead of making a neat segue from the old DC-verse, it appears Gunn will be going with a completely clean slate that pretends Snyder’s films never existed. Perhaps this is a good thing – out with the old, in with the new and all that. And let’s face it, most of them were crap. But this is certainly in marked contrast to Marvel’s current approach, which appears to be adopting an inclusive approach to its cinematic universe that could even see half the cast of the deeply average X-Men movies (films made by another studio, 20th Century Fox) getting a run-out in the new era.
All of it makes you think that the suits at Warner must have decided that the DCEU years stank so terribly that they were best left to rot in perpetuity, which is really an indictment of the studio itself for letting things fester so horribly. Musk may (allegedly) have wanted to burn the studio to the ground if it tried to sack his girlfriend, but it turns out Warner was right there with him when it came to the Snyderverse. Pour petrol on the bonfire and watch the spandex curl and melt in the leaping flames, for there is nothing left here worth salvaging.
