It’s no secret that Justice League underwent a lot of changes during its journey to the big screen, including cutting out another classic DC Comics villain entirely.
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As part of a Reddit AMA thread, an anonymous visual effects artist posting as LDN_Film said the evil New God known as Desaad was in the film at one point, saying he “looked grim reapery, skull like with a big cloak.”
Desaad, like Steppenwolf, serves Darkseid in Apokolips in the comic books. He was created by legendary comic creator Jack Kirby, much like many other characters and concepts from the Fourth World.
Desaad first appeared in Forever People #2 back in 1971. As the master torturer of Darkseid, he is charged with inflicting pain and extracting information from the evil New God’s enemies.
The DC Films effects artist did not reveal how prominently Desaad was going to figure in the film or if he was going to be featured in the flashback sequence where the Earth’s various armies unite to fight Steppenwolf.
In the movie, as Wonder Woman tells the story of Steppenwolf’s first attempt to unite the three Mother Boxes and destroy Earth, three hooded figures are shown to be handling each of the artifacts.
Though they wear robes much like Desaad does in the comics, they’re not the same characters as described by the effects artist.
While it would have been awesome to see another creation from Jack Kirby coming to life on the big screen, they probably cut the character from Justice League for a good reason. Other than a specific namedrop of ‘Darkseid’ from Steppenwolf, the film doesn’t go too much into detail on the Fourth World.
We see Parademons and Wonder Woman references the “hellscape” of their home world, but other than that Apokolips is probably going to be further fleshed out in the future. Adding a character like Desaad without going into detail of where these characters came from might be confusing.
As it is, Steppenwolf doesn’t need to be further fleshed out because we know his motivation is simple: he wants to destroy the Earth. Hopefully we get to see Desaad and other New Gods in a future DC Films project.
Justice League is now playing in theaters.
