Chris Terrio May Not Write JUSTICE LEAGUE PART TWO; PART ONE Will Be Lighter Than BATMAN v SUPERMAN
Batman v Superman writer Chris Terrio reveals that he may not write the screenplay for Justice League Part Two and describes Part One as the culmination of a trilogy which began with Man of Steel.
In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice writer Chris Terrio (Argo) has shed some light on why he said yes to writing Justice League Part One for Zack Snyder and Warner Bros. Confirming that he initially declined the opportunity to work on the movie, it turns out that we have the new Lex Luthor to thank for his return. "I initially thought I wasn’t the guy to do Justice League and went off to work on something else. But the first day I went to the set, I saw Jesse [Eisenberg] in a scene with Holly Hunter and I really did feel like I was watching some strange, great performance in an independent film. At that moment, I thought, 'I’m not done with this yet. I want to go back and keep telling the story.'"
As for how that movie differs to Batman v Superman, it turns out that the team-up between all of these heroes will be nowhere near as dark as what's come before. "Batman v Superman is a bit of an Empire Strikes Back or Two Towers or any similar middle film in a trilogy. The middle film tends to be the darkest one. I do think from Man of Steel through Justice League, it is one saga really. I expect Justice League will be tonally not quite as dark as Batman v Superman. From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit." It sounds then like Justice League will actually be the culmination of the story which began in Man of Steel, but where does that leave Part Two? Could Warner Bros. have jumped the gun by making it sound as if we're getting one big story over two movies instead of two individual releases? Either way, Terrio may not be back for that.
"I have written Justice League Part One, but I won’t necessarily write Part Two," he confirms. "This has been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life. For Batman v Superman, I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology. For Justice League, I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench. If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies, I would say you were crazy. But I do think fans deserve that. I felt I owed the fan base all of my body and soul for two years because anything less wouldn’t have been appreciating the opportunity I had."
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