The worlds of Marvel and DC comic books are divided into their out and out superheroes, lesser-known heroes, anti-heroes and their very firmly supernatural and horror-based content. For DC, the latter of these was fully realized in 2011 when the New 52 launch brought a new team to the fore with Justice League Dark, a group that would over time consist of staple supernatural characters such as John Constantine, Deadman, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna and Swamp Thing among others. With John Constantine having had his own movie, with Keanu Reeves, and appeared in TV shows such as Legends of Tomorrow, Swamp Thing getting an all too short series, and Madame Xanadu being hinted as another character heading to the small screen, we could at some point see Justice League Dark make an appearance at some point. However, writer and director Guillermo Del Toro has already attempted to bring the group to the big screen before in a long-abandoned project which was last discussed in 2017.
Del Toro was reportedly attached to the “Dark Universe” project – as it was called before Universal poached that name for their planned monsterverse – a year after the Justice League Dark made their comic book debut. The Shape of Water director was connected with the movie until 2015, when he departed and was replaced with Doug Liman, best known for his work on The Bourne Identity. However, from there, the Justice League Dark project went dark itself without ever really moving forward in any real capacity.
For Del Toro, it would have been a passion project as the direct recently discussed a bit about what his movie would have looked like and revealed that he has always been “a DC Guy.” Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, Del Toro said:
“I took a little bit of the opening of the Alan Moore Constantine. And I took the dynamics between [Abby Arcane] and Swamp Thing, and I took the sort of revelatory moments when Deadman gets into a body, how he would experience the consciousness of that being. And one of my all time’s favourites is the demon Etrigan. I love that character. Zatanna is really, for me, another character that is really effortlessly powerful and interesting. Trying to mix that with Klarion the Witch Boy…I was [always] a DC guy.”
While that movie project was seemingly abandoned in 2017, J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot jumped on board the DC bandwagon in 2020 to develop a number of film and TV projects based on the Justice League Dark characters, which has seen talk of a new Constantine series and Madam Xanadu series being produced for HBO Max, as well as a Zatanna movie which has also been greenlit. While many fans will always wonder what a Del Toro directed version of Justice League Dark would have been, it seems that Warner Bros. is moving ahead with a much more long term plan that will likely culminate in a Justice League Dark crossover movie, which will hopefully serve them better than their gung-ho Justice League movie which almost managed to sink the DCEU before it had truly begun.
About The Author
