Earlier today, we brought you some details about Chris Terrio's experience working on Justice League, but the writer has also gone back to the beginning of his time in the DC Extended Universe by reflecting on his time working on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Throughout this Vanity Fair interview, Terrio makes it clear that "I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about Zack" and that their time working together was collaborative and positive.
The same can't really be said about Warner Bros.
"Ben [Affleck] called me and said that he was working on this film, which was a Superman film in which he was going to play Batman. So he asked if I would read the script and consider doing a rewrite," Terrio said of how he came to be involved with the movie. "He asked if I would do some character work. So it was already determined and storyboarded that Batman was going to be trying to kill Superman and that Batman was going to have gone down a dark road. He was branding criminals, and it had certain dark elements that were nonnegotiable and already in the story."
While he got to work on those elements of the screenplay, Terrio was just as turned off by the title as the majority of fans where when "Dawn of Justice" was revealed as the cringe-worthy subtitle.
"I wrote drafts of the Batman/Superman movie, which wasn’t called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice by me. I did not name the script. In fact, I found out what the movie was called along with the rest of the world on the internet. I was not consulted on the title of the film, and I was as surprised as anyone. I would not have named it Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice."
"I don’t know exactly who named it, but I suspect it was the studio and I suspect it was marketing, to be honest with you. It might have been the first step toward creating ill will for the film."
As for the negative critical reception, Terrio adds that "I was proud of the script when I completed it, but it turns out that when you remove the 30 minutes that give the characters motivation for the climax, the film just doesn’t work. As we learned from the two versions of Justice League, you can’t skip on the character and think the audience will give a shit about the VFX."
He also says that despite later comments from the studio that the movie was too dark, they were perfectly happy with his screenplay when it was delivered.
It's no secret that Warner Bros. panicked when Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was released to negative reviews, hence why both Suicide Squad and Justice League were butchered in post-production. Terrio and Snyder have taken a lot of the blame for the 2016 movie's failings, but there's a much better movie to be found in the "Ultimate Edition" which has that extra 30 minutes!