Unless you’ve been on Mars with the others from the secret mission, you will know that both Marvel and DC Comics are planning on taking over the movies for the next decade or so. Warner Bros. is betting heavily on its Batman Vs Superman spin-off Justice League which if successful will open the door to a raft of superheroes doing superheroic things and making superheroic profits for the studio. Well, dressing up in silly costumes and saving the world is all very well if you’re visibly fighting a just cause. But what about all those dirty little jobs that need doing that nobody ever hears about? All those black ops and wet jobs and plausibly deniable goings-on? Think Superman is going to off a South American guerrilla because he’s an inconvenience to the CIA? Is Wonder Woman going to fly her invisible plane into a Third World junta’s airspace and drop Democracy leaflets just because the boys at Langley think it would be a helpful election strategy for their puppet candidate? Of course not. For these sorts of jobs, you need a more morally-compromised superhero. In other words, you need the men and women of DC Comic’s Justice League Dark. And Guillermo del Toro wants to bring them to the big screen.
According to The A.V. Club, del Toro has just delivered his script for Dark Universe to Warner Bros. The movie “is based on the DC comics series that calls upon some of the publisher’s supernatural characters to take on the jobs too weird and grisly for the regular Justice League. The original members of the team included John Constantine, Madame Xanadu, Deadman, Shade, the Changing Man, and Zatanna, but the group has inducted the likes of Frankenstein and Swamp Thing over the years.” It will be interesting to see what Warner Bros. thinks of del Toro’s script; at present, the Justice League Dark movie does not fit into the studio’s plan for superhero movies , and after all, they are already developing the similar-sounding Suicide Squad. Either way, it’s a sound business decision: a superhero film with several characters (and consequently several movie stars) is decidedly a better risk than one centered on just one. After all, the formula has worked very well for Marvel.
