With Zack Snyder’s Justice League now streaming on HBO Max, DC fans are finally getting to see not only filmmaker Zack Snyder’s vision for the superhero team-up, but also get to see more of Joe Manganiello‘s Slade Wilson/Deathstroke. Manganiello debuted the character in Justice League and, at the time, there were plans for the character to have a major role in Ben Affleck’s solo Batman film and, at one point, even a Deathstroke solo film. While Warner Bros. has since taken a different direction with its live-action DC Universe, should they ever want to revisit a Deathstroke film, according to Manganiello all the plans are in place.
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During his appearance on ComicBook.com’s ComicBook Nation podcast, Manganiello said all of the “tracks” for a Deathstroke movie have been laid down and that he’d genuinely love for DC fans to get to see it.
“You know all of that – all of those tracks [for the Deathstroke movie] have been laid down,” Manganiello said. “So you know it’s all there and I think it would really be a shame if the fans never got to see that. I would go to my grave unhappy.”
As for what those tracks are, Manganiello outlined some of the work he’d done and ideas he had for Deathstroke after the Batman solo film fell apart.
“The studio was very much enthralled by all of the research that I was doing. I was starting to build the character out and pitch them ideas and I build a back story and kind of build. You know, because I think a lot of times the comic book stories of Deathstroke are very, very far-fetched. You know, they’re very superhero-ish,” Manganiello said. “You know where Deathstroke’s holding a submarine over his head and throwing it, you know? And I wanted Deathstroke to be human and grounded and so I started with, you know, he was a part of the American military. OK, well what part? What branch? What would he have done? Where would have been, you know what did? What did his wife do? You know, and then of course, like the League of Shadows influence? And why does he carry a sword? And how do you learn how to use a sword? If you’re, you know, most military guys don’t mess around with katanas, it’s just not what they do. So that part of the story needed to build out. And so I was really grounding it and they really, you know they loved it. So I worked on that for six months.”
He continued, “The end of that six month period I wound up having a two-hour long Skype call with Gareth Evans which I’ve talked about before, and Gareth and entered into negotiations with the studio to make a like stripped-down version of Deathstroke that was almost like, imagine Deathstroke in The Raid 2 film, a revenge film with Slade, the mask, the patch, how he lost his son.”
For now, though, it doesn’t seem like a Deathstroke movie is on the horizon. WarnerMedia CEO Ann Sarnoff said earlier this week that there are no plans to move forward with the so-called Snyderverse.
“I appreciate that they love Zack’s work and we are very thankful for his many contributions to DC,” Sarnoff told Variety. “We’re just so happy that he could bring his cut of the Justice League to life because that wasn’t in the plan until about a year ago. With that comes the completion of his trilogy. We’re very happy we’ve done this, but we’re very excited about the plans we have for all the multi-dimensional DC characters that are being developed right now.”
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.
