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David Goyer: The Future of WB's DC Movies "Was Being Built On Air"

David Goyer explains that in the early days of the DC universe were "being built on air" because no scripts were complete.

Published Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:31:05 -0500

by Kaitlyn Booth

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The year is 2012, and Christopher Nolan, with the help of David Goyer, is looking to bring Nolan's trilogy of Batman films to an end. The trilogy has garnered the studio critical and commercial acclaim, but the timing was not exactly working out in everyone's favor. At the same time that Nolan was putting out the second of his Batman films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was beginning. The world was waiting to see if cinematic movie universes were a thing that was going to work, and Man of Steel, a new Superman film that both Goyer and Nolan were involved with under the helm of director Zack Snyder, became a new foundation to build a DC universe on. However, Man of Steel came out in 2013, a year after Marvel had finished the first phase of the MCU, and studio heads wanted Warner Bros. and DC to stop being "behind." The problem is that Warner Bros. wanted their own MCU, and they wanted it right now, failing to realize that the MCU was built over four years. Goyer was recently on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast (via Variety), and he talked about those early days on the ground trying to build a DC Cinematic Universe at three times the speed.

"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. "The other thing that was difficult at the time was there was this revolving door of executives at Warner Bros. and DC. Every 18 months, someone new would come in. We were just getting whiplash. Every new person was like, 'We're going to go bigger!'"

Zack Snyder's Justice League & Why #RestoreTheSnyderVerse is a Bad Idea — Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League Posters. Credit: Warner Bros.

Nothing good was ever going to come from trying to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe at three times the speed, but it wasn't even as bad as Warner Bros. trying to build a DC universe on a foundation where the cement maybe wasn't dry, or the foundation wasn't complete yet. Goyer explained that Warner Bros. was trying to build a DC universe on nothing because the scripts for these films didn't even exist.

"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 ten years. But none of them had been written yet!" Goyer continued in amazement. "It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air… This is not how you build a house."

You might remember those Comic-Con presentations where Warner Bros. talked up all of the DC movies in production, like Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Cyborg. While some of those did see the light of day, to say that the path to completion was rough would be an understatement. It sounds like this was very much movie-making by way of executives instead of movie-making by way of creatives or even people with knowledge of how to build something like this. DC wasn't ever going to succeed by trying to copy Marvel's homework; it's just a shame that millions of dollars, potential, and great castings were all lost on the journey to the new beginning we're on now.

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