Justice League's underperformance at the box office resulted in Warner Bros. making some big changes to the DCEU, with plans for a lot of movies and characters either revamped or tossed out completely. One major causality of this studio overhaul was Joe Manganiello's Deathstroke.
The True Blood alum only got to suit-up as Slade Wilson for a brief Justice League post-credits stinger, and while he was all set to return as the main villain of Ben Affleck's Batman movie, everything changed when the actor/director decided to part ways with the project and Matt Reeves was brought on to deliver his own take on The Dark Knight.
During an interview with Yahoo, Manganiello shared some new details on Affleck's now defunct script, drawing comparisons to David Fincher's 1997 thriller, The Game.
“It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out. It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him.”
It sounds like Affleck may also have been inspired by Frank Miller's "Born Again" Daredevil arc to some extent!
“It was really cool, really dark and really hard,” Manganiello added. “I was very excited for it.”
The actor also confirmed that his Justice League scene on the boat with Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) was originally going to set up Affleck's Batman film, but the sequence was reworked to tie-into the events of the also abandoned Justice League 2.
“They reshot all of Jesse’s dialogue to tease Justice League Part 2, which was going to be about the Injustice League,” Manganiello explains. “All of that dialogue was about Batman originally, and it was changed to lines like ‘Shouldn’t we have a league of our own?’”
Manganiello will return as the lethal mercenary for Zack Snyder's Justice League, so hopefully he'll be given a real opportunity to sink his teeth into the role.