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The countdown is on! Zack Snyder is all set to unleash his Director’s Cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE and from the looks of the latest trailer, the stakes have never been more apocalyptic as DC Comics’ most iconic heroes team-up and face the darkness!
It would appear that in Hollywood, you truly get another turn up at bat, second chances are a reality — especially if you’re Zack Snyder. The filmmaker behind the millennium’s most stylistic epic blockbusters including 300 (based on Frank Miller’s work) and the big-screen adaptation of Watchman was tasked with the impossible: match the success of the competitor’s expanded cinematic universe and take the DC movie heroes to the next level. Although Warner Bros. had unprecedented success with its Batman franchises, it didn’t hit the ball out of the field with its other movie heroes.
It was tough enough to have to follow the success of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy which rebooted and reinterpreted Batman for a more sophisticated palette, but Snyder was determined to prove that DC and Warner Bros. were indeed up to the task. After several bumps in the road, it appeared that perhaps the course had become steady.
Snyder’s first installment into establishing a connected continuity was to (re)ignite interest in Superman’s theatrical bankability with Man of Steel (2013) which similarly reestablished the origins of the world’s greatest superhero in a hyper-realistic style that matched or sat similarly to Nolan’s own take on Batman. The film firmly established its star Henry Cavill as the proper torchbearer of the “S” shield and cape, although Brandon Routh had also suited up for Bryan Singer’s 2006 homage to the Richard Donner classic.
And even with a modest box office to win over an audience, the much grittier and darkly saturated Man of Steel gave rise to a sequel. Warner Bros. and DC seized on the opportunity to turn its next feature Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice into its backdoor introduction to the larger, expanded theatrical multiverse that the studio and DC were so richly hoping to mine. That feature brought Cavill back as Superman, recast Ben Affleck as the Caped Crusader, and introduced Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, firmly establishing the DC Comics Trinity in film.