It turns out Zack Snyder’s cancelled Justice League sequel introduced a major supervillain.
During an interview with Inverse, storyboard artist Jay Oliva revealed that the DC’s big bad wasn’t going to be Darkseid after all – it was all about Professor Zoom.
“It was Professor Zoom pulling the strings because he had come from the future to basically f**k with Barry,” he said about Rick Famuyiwa’s cancelled Flash movie. “In the Flash movies, Zoom would be the villain in the background. But also in the ancillary other films, you would see some of the influences of Zoom on the rest of the Justice League.”
The plan, it seems, was to introduce Zoom in the Justice League sequel.
“At the ending of Zack’s Darkseid quadrilogy, or whatever, we would end up with a Justice League Unlimited version of the Snyder-verse,” he explained. “And then you flip it. You do Flashpoint Paradox. Everybody who’s friends are now enemies, and it’s a world that you don’t want to live in. You can reboot the universe and introduce a new cast that way. Because after 10 years, the actors need to go onto something else.”
Clearly Darkseid would have factored into the DCEU in a major way, but it looks as though Zoom would have been the real big bad, pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
In many ways, it’s reminiscent of Marvel’s recent fair, using Thanos in its first phase and now shifting towards another supervillain in the form of Kang.
However, the DC storylines simply never came to be.
Famuyiwa’s Flash movie was cancelled – replaced by The Flash. And while DC apparently had plans to make trilogies out of all its main players, those never transpired either.
“Rick’s movie was laying the groundwork for Zoom as the big baddy of the DC Universe,” said Oliva.
“Originally, there was supposed to be just Zack’s five films and one side movie, which ended up being Suicide Squad,” he explained. However, the success of Man of Steel caused Warner Bros. to go all in on the DCEU. “Rick’s movie was going to be a series of films, just like Aquaman. I think all of those films, they were planning to be trilogies.”
Obviously, at some point this changed. Now, the DCEU has been canned in favour of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s upcoming DCU.
Whether or not Zoom will end up playing a role here remains to be seen.
Want to read more? Check out whether Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch will ever get a director’s cut and find out which cancelled DC movie ended up being accidentally promoted by Warner Bros.
