With production underway on Batman vs. Superman, we should expect to hear plenty about Warner Bros. Man of Steel sequel over the coming weeks and months (which will no doubt be music to DC fans’ ears), and to start things off director Zack Snyder has taken part in a lengthy interview with Forbes, during which he spoke in depth about the hotly-anticipated film…
On the decision to include Batman (Ben Affleck) alongside Henry Cavill’s Superman in the Man of Steel seuqel: “It definitely was a thing that… after Man of Steel finished and we started talking about what would be in the next movie, I started subtly mentioning that it would be cool if he faced Batman. In the first meeting, it was like, ‘Maybe Batman?’ Maybe at the end of the second movie, some Kryptonite gets delivered to Bruce Wayne’s house or something. Like in a cryptic way, that’s the first time we see him. But then, once you say it out loud, right? You’re in a story meeting talking about, like, who should [Superman] fight if he fought this giant alien threat Zod who was basically his equal physically, from his planet, fighting on our turf… You know, who to fight next? The problem is, once you say it out loud, then it’s kind of hard to go back, right? Once you say, ‘What about Batman?’ then you realize, ‘Okay, that’s a cool idea. What else?’ I mean, what do you say after that? But I’m not gonna say at all that when I took the job to do Man of Steel that I did it in a subversive way to get to Batman. I really believe that only after contemplating who could face [Superman] did Batman come into the picture.”
On seeing Affleck and Cavill suited up alongside Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman: “The thing also that’s really fascinating for me is that, even just in the tests we’ve been doing, the costumes, right? You basically have Batman and Superman — and this is without Ben and Henry in the costumes, but just like the stand-ins, just testing to see what the costumes look like. And you have them standing there and they’re standing in the same shot — and then we have Wonder Woman, you know, all three of them in the same shot. Even just for a test, you really have to go, “Wow, that’s crazy!” Not only is it the first time that I’m seeing them, it’s the first time they’ve ever existed together on screen in a movie. And that’s kind of a huge deal. Even just Batman and Superman standing next to each other… It’s kind of epic. You do sort of sense the weight of the pop culture iconography jumping out of its skin when you’re standing there looking at the two of them and Wonder Woman. It’s crazy. But it’s fun. I mean, I have the first photo, I’ve got it in my archive because I was like, ‘Okay, I better keep this, it’s gonna be worth something.'”
And the $64,000 question – when might we see the Trinity in their costumes: “Unfortunately, I don’t even know the timeline… Because the movie takes place so far from now, it’s hard to know exactly. That all gets tied to marketing and strategies for the movie. It’s not just a free-for-all, which I’d love it to be. Because I take a picture of the suit with my camera– I’m actually staring at one right now in my office. And it’s just massive on my wall in my office and it’s epic, let me tell you! And I’m like, “God, I want to send this to the Internet immediately.” But I know I’m not allowed to [laughs]! I do value the sort of excitement of the way the film is [revealed]… the pieces that are released and sort of trickle out to everybody, and those reveals are exciting milestones for us.”
Batman vs. Superman is set for release on May 6th 2016 with a cast that also includes returning Man of Steel stars Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Diane Lane (Martha Kent) and Laurence Fishburne (Perry White) alongside Jesse Eisenberg (Now You See Me) as Lex Luthor, Jeremy Irons (The Borgias) as Alfred Pennyworth and Holly Hunter (The Piano), Callan Mulvey (300: Rise of an Empire) and Tao Okamoto (The Wolverine) in as-yet-unrevealed roles.
Originally published April 17, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
