Chris Terrio penned the screenplays for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League (Zack Snyder's version), and in a tell-all interview with Vanity Fair, he's revealed how little thought Warner Bros. put into the DC Extended Universe during its earliest days.
The studio may have announced a full slate of films at the time, but that doesn't mean any thought was put into how they'd all link up and ultimately inform each other.
"[Kevin] Tsujihara, as far as I can tell, and the brass at the very top, decided the order of the films," the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker writer explained. "I was not consulted on the order of the films, even though I was the person writing Justice League. They just determined that it was going to be Batman/Superman, and then Wonder Woman, then Justice League, and then Aquaman. So there was never any thought to how the world was constructed before they issued this edict. They said, ‘Conform to this schedule.’"
Terrio elaborated on how this attitude made his job harder, especially as he had to introduce characters with no background (and was given no indication of how they should be portrayed). That explains why in Justice League, Aquaman and Mera talk in an underwater bubble.
"The Wonder Woman script wasn’t even finished when I wrote Justice League. So I had no basis to write Wonder Woman other than Batman [vs.] Superman. Themyscira didn’t even exist," he says. "I was never shown anything on the page for it. I didn’t know whether people could talk underwater. That was a thing that I had to ask because I didn’t know if I could do underwater scenes with Aquaman and Atlanteans. It was all just from scratch because there had been no [solo] character films."
The odds were stacked against Snyder and Terrio from the start, it seems, and it's no wonder there's such a major tonal shift between Justice League and the various solo films.
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