David S. Goyer knows a thing or two about the superhero genre: The Foundation writer and executive producer wrote Blade; co-wrote the Oscar-winning Batman movie The Dark Knight; and wrote Henry Cavill‘s hit 2013 Superman debut, Man of Steel, among others.
However, on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he confirmed what many fans believed at the time — that Warner Bros. was so desperate to catch up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that common sense started flying out the window, without Superman’s ability to actually take flight.
“I know the pressure we were getting from Warner Bros., which was, ‘We need our MCU! We need our MCU!’ And I was like, ‘Let’s not run before we walk,'” Goyer said.
“I remember at one point the person running Warner Bros. at the time had this release that pitched the next 20 movies over the next 10 years. But none of them had been written yet,” Goyer said with a laugh. “It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air.”
While none of those movies got made, he explained that the studio rushed 2015’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice as a team-up movie to try to compete with Marvel’s The Avengers.
The film was seemingly hastily announced at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, with DC movie actor Harry Lennix called to the stage to literally read a portion of Frank Miller‘s iconic The Dark Knight Returns — which saw the two heroes famously clash — from a piece of paper.
The Zack Snyder movie underperformed at the box office, and with fans, and the studio kept tripping on their heroes’ capes into 2017’s Justice League.
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