Perversely, it’s been the success Christopher Nolan’s vision for Batman that has made a Justice League tie-up more difficult to achieve. Those films, together with Marvel’s catalogue, demonstrate the two ways to make a superhero movie: go dark, gritty and realistic, like Batman; or go colourful and frivolous, like the Avengers.
DC has a foot in both camps, and that’s the problem that they are going to have to overcome. It’s difficult to imagine a film that could successfully meld Ryan Reynold’s Green Lantern with Christian Bale’s Batman. One movie is flippant and cartoonish, the other is more akin to hard-boiled crime caper. Although I’m hearing strong rumours that Zach Snyder’s vision for Superman (which is, remember, very heavily influenced by the Nolan brothers) is harder-edged that the Richard Donner/Bryan Singer versions, it’s still difficult to imagine that Man of Steel is going to draw more from the Batman aesthetic than that deployed so successfully by Marvel (and less successfully by Warner with Green Lantern). Throw in the Flash and, to a lesser extent, Wonder Woman, and it is tough to predict a film that majors on realism.
Batman, at least in his current incarnation, doesn’t comfortably fit the lighter pattern. That begs the question: what will Warner do with the character once Nolan finishes his trilogy? The first two films have been so successful that rebooting with another actor under the cowl is going to be fiendishly difficult to pull off. Christian Bale has indicated that he wouldn’t be averse to reprising Bruce Wayne, but that was with the qualification that it would need to be in a fourth Nolan project. With the auteur seemingly shutting the door on Batman (and opening it to Bond), it seems unlikely that he would be interested in trying to emulate the juggling act that Joss Whedon pulled off with the Avengers. So do they recast? Would the public accept another Batman? Warner are probably looking very carefully at the reaction to the Andrew Garfield Spiderman reboot.
But all of that is a story for another day.
Today’s news is that Warner is clearly determined to surmount these problems. Will Beall, the screenwriter behind the upcoming Gangster Squad, has been inked to produce a script for A Justice League movie. Beall is a hot property in Tinseltown and he's going to have to prove himself, and how - I really don't envy the task of remoulding such a disparate array of characters into something cohesive and credible, and then going head to head with the box office numbers that Joss Whedon has delivered. I don't fancy that at all.
Source: Coming Soon
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