Two of DC’s most formidable villains will be crossing paths in a new movie. On Friday, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that a live-action feature is in the works at James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios starring Batman villlains Bane and Deathstroke. Matthew Orton, whose work includes Marvel Studios’ forthcoming Captain America: Brave New World, is penning the script, which does not currently have a director attached. It is unclear at this point where the Deathstroke and Bane project will fall on the timeline in relation to DC Studios’ planned Batman reboot, The Brave and the Bold.
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Despite both being antagonists in the orbit of Batman, Bane and Deathstroke have only tangentially interacted in the comics. This naturally leads to speculation that this crossover movie could take a different shape within the DC Universe, potentially as a vehicle for the Secret Six or another antiheroic team. Dave Bautista, who has worked with Gunn on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, has repeatedly thrown his hat into the ring to portray Bane. Deathstroke, meanwhile, was most recently portrayed by Joe Manganiello in the DC Extended Universe continuity.
What Is on the DC Universe Slate?
The initial DC Studios slate will include 2025’s Superman, 2026’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and currently-undated movies The Brave and the Bold, Swamp Thing, and The Authority. It will also include the HBO Max television shows Waller, Booster Gold, Lanterns, Paradise Lost, and an animated Creature Commandos series. Reports have indicated that a live-action Teen Titans movie and an animated Jurassic League movie are in the works at DC Studios, although neither have been publicly confirmed.
“A lot of people think it’s going to be Marvel 2.0, and definitely I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences,” Gunn explained in 2023. “We are telling a big, huge, central story that is like Marvel, except for, I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we’re also creating a universe that is like Star Wars, where there’s different times, different places, different things, or Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex.”
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