Tom King, who is set to launch the Batman/Catwoman comic for DC, said in a new interview that he finds himself serving as a kind of intellectual intermediary between American geniuses while he works on the screenplay for DC’s The New Gods with filmmaker Ava DuVernay. The project, about which little is known other than the involvement of King and DuVernay, will expand the mythology of the DC Universe on the big screen, potentially opening up some of Kirby’s biggest and wildest ideas to a new generation of viewers who haven’t read the King’s comics firsthand. Of course, to do so, it will have to compete for attention with Marvel’s Eternals, which can say similar things.
The movie, which King is co-writing with DuVernay, is expected to go into production in 2020 and will likely feature Mister Miracle and Big Barda quite a bit. King and his collaborators Mitch Gerads and Nick Derington extended their Eisner winning streak for Mister Miracle this summer at Comic Con. He and DuVernay have both been fairly quiet so far about exactly what is going on with the film.
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“I feel like I have this genius, Jack Kirby, who created this [series] and this genius Ava DuVernay,” King told Publishers Weekly. “I see them as parallel figures, both taking their uniquely American backgrounds and using them to push American art forward into places it’s never been before. I feel like it’s job to bring those two geniuses to together and to make it work.”
The writers’ room for this movie seems to be a love-fest, since DuVernay also called King a genius back in July.
Set in a corner of the DC Universe created by Jack Kirby, The New Gods follows a group of powerful beings (the titular New Gods), half of whom are good and live on the planet of New Genesis and half of whom are evil and live under the iron fist of Darkseid on Apokolips. Darkseid’s family has already been represented onscreen, in the form of Justice League villain Steppenwolf. The Parademons, Apokolips’s cannon fodder troops, were the self-destructing, flying monsters also seen in that film as well as in the Knightmare sequence from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
As it stands now, New Gods has yet to receive a release date. Upcoming DC films include Joker on October 10th, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) on February 7, 2020, Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5, 2020, The Batman on June 25, 2021, The Suicide Squad on August 6, 2021, and Aquaman 2 on December 16, 2022.
