Despite it now being nearly two years since Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it was putting its beleaguered DC Comics line of superhero films into the hands of actual money makers James Gunn and Peter Safran, the whole apparatus has still felt pretty tentative to date. Partly, that’s just because, after clearing out the bodies left behind by the previous administration—i.e., The Flash— it’s taken Gunn a minute to get Superman, presumably his whole thesis statement on the universe, into theaters. (It’s out in July of 2025.) But also, it’s just been hard to get a shape for this thing, with only a handful of future projects announced, like Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow and Andy Muschietti’s The Brave And The Bold. (It doesn’t help that the brand as a whole remains weirdly divided, with both Joker, and Matt Reeves’ The Batman, existing in their own little side pockets.) Into that miasma, though, we can now add a new data point: THR reports that Moon Knight and Captain America: Big Red Harrison Ford writer Matthew Orton has been tapped to write a movie based around Batman bad guys Deathstroke and Bane.
Why those two? Genuinely hard to say, beyond the fact that both tend toward more militaristic Batman stories. Bane has had a decent enough run in theaters, with Tom Hardy’s endlessly imitated turn as the back-breaking baddie in The Dark Knight Rises largely redeeming the character’s cartoonish portrayal in 1997’s Batman & Robin. Deathstroke, though, has only had a few seconds of screen time in live-action movies, in the form of a Joe Manganiello after-credits cameo in 2017’s Justice League. (Not counting his appearances in the various Teen Titans projects, including Will Arnett voicing him in the animated Teen Titans Go! To The Movies.) Both characters tend to be a little on the more serious side, putting actual armies into the field, and both are noted for being the rare DC Comics combatants able to give Batman a run for his money in hand-to-hand combat. Beyond that, though, they don’t have any major comics connections between them—which, when you think about it, really opens up some possibilities for how they end up in each other’s orbit. Maybe they both end up dating the same girl? Hired at the same failing small-town newspaper? Find out they’ve been email penpals all along? The sky’s the limit, really—which could also be the motto of Gunn and Safran’s whole reboot project, at least until an actual movie comes out and ruins everything by actually existing.
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