In the final moments of the perplexing chaos that was 2017’s Justice League, True Blood actor Joe Manganiello was introduced as supervillain Deathstroke, recruited by Lex Luthor for vengeance against the likes of Ben Affleck’s Batman. Indeed, a solo DCEU Deathstroke movie was in the works at Warner Bros, set to bring the iconic character’s origin story to life on the big screen, and The Raid director Gareth Evans was attached to direct.
“I was actually quite enthused and excited about [Deathstroke] back in the day, when it was first pitched to me,” recalled Evans with Yahoo while promoting his new Sky series, Gangs of London. “I met with them, and talked to them about it, and was certainly attached to it at a certain point.”
Unfortunately, Justice League had been plagued with problems, including the loss of Zack Snyder at the helm of the project midway through filming. As of last year, the DC team-up flick had the ‘honor’ of being the highest-grossing film to become a box office bomb, due to a combination of its huge budget – thought to be in the region of $300 million – and an ultimate gross that saw WB lose around $60 million. A proposed sequel was pushed aside for Affleck to star in his own Batman film, which never materialized, and the actor ultimately quit the role. As a result of these events and other factors, the studio began rethinking Snyder’s vision for the DCEU, and its plans for Deathstroke seemed to fritter out.
“I’ve spoken to Joe Manganiello, who was attached to star as Deathstroke,” Evans said. “I spoke to him a while back, and we both lamented the fact that it didn’t happen. But yeah, I don’t really have much more than that, in terms of anything lately on it.”
