Batman v Superman and Justice League screenwriter Chris Terrio has broken his silence about collaborating with Zack Snyder on those Warner Bros. projects in a big way. In addition to opening up about wanting his name removed from the theatrical cut of Justice League among other bombshells, Terrio had something to say about the way he felt that Warner Bros. was making their decisions with regard to the World of DC ahead of the release of 2016’s “Dawn of Justice” (a title he says he did not choose nor be consulted on). Speaking with Vanity Fair, Terrio claimed the “boardrooms” at Warner Bros. started making decisions “based on arbitrary metrics,” revealing an investors event before the film’s release that made him think this.
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“Right before the time of Batman/Superman, I was asked to attend an event in New York where the cast and filmmakers were paraded in front of a room of investors at the Time Warner Center, I guess to convince them that their money was in good hands,” Terrio said. “These guys were in charge because they controlled the money at the very top of the pyramid. They were making big decisions—not the film executives we’re talking about, but Wall Street guys.”
He continued, “One guy, who I can only describe as the man who Central Casting sends you when you’re trying to cast Douchebag #1, pulled me aside and started telling me how to write Batman. I’m not naive. I know that if you don’t want to have any back-and-forth with the money people, then you should write poetry because you don’t need hundreds of millions of dollars. But something about the distribution of power at that time just seemed off to me. It was removing even the pretense that capital wasn’t calling the shots.”
Terrio offered an example for some of the studio meddling in Batman v Superman, saying that it became clear to him that the sequences of nuance and character development would be the first things cut out because “The last things to get cut out always are the stunt scenes and the special effects scenes because they cost so much.”
“By the time they’re all in there in the assembly, enormous amounts of money have been spent on every frame,” he said. “So when you’re looking to cut time, the things that get cut out tend not to be the big effects sequences or the fights or the stunt sequences. The things that get cut are the…the scenes that actually give meaning to those bigger action sequences. I think that’s a problem not only with this film, but I suppose for all tentpole films.”
To his credit, Terrio came out in support of Zack Snyder’s extended editions of both Batman v Superman and Justice League, saying “I’m awfully happy that Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League is the one that is higher on my IMDb page.”
