It appears that Slade Wilson’s upcoming appearance in ‘Teen Titans GO! To the Movies’ may be the only cinematic dose of Deathstroke the Terminator that fans get for quite some time. Back in 2016, Ben Affleck posted a short video of an unnamed actor inside the armor of DC Comics’ mercenary Deathstroke. It was soon learned that it was Joe Manganiello behind the full-face mask and that he would be a villain in Affleck’s planned solo film ‘The Batman’, which at the time Affleck was planning to write, direct and star in. Things were cemented when Manganiello made a surprise cameo in the post-credits scene in ‘Batman V Superman’. Then things hit a few snags. ‘The Batman’ was delayed due to creative changes, such as Affleck opting not to direct after all. ‘Deathstroke’ was expected to get his own movie, with Gareth Evans directing, but there has been little word on the status of that film, especially in light of Warner Brothers’ shuffling its DC movies around due to the financial disappointments of ‘Batman V Superman’, ‘Suicide Squad’ and especially ‘Justice League.’
Evans recently discussed his schedule on social media and it appears that he is book solid until 2020. He is currently in post-production on his action thriller ‘Apostle’ and may move directly from that to another original project, ‘Blister’.
For his part, Manganiello appeared on Chris Hardwick’s podcast Id10t and said:
“There were talks with Gareth Evans and talks of an origin movie. I’m not giving news, this was [already out there]. But I spent 6 months prior to all of those phone calls, writing a backstory, which was turned into 16-pages, which was turned into a treatment, which led to my skype call with Gareth.”
If Evans is occupied, it is possible that WB could bring in another director, but they seem to be proceeding with a lot of caution when it comes to the DC movies, so the delay could be considerable.
Manganiello was recently in attendance at Oz Comic Con, where fans reported that he stated that he would be appearing in ‘Suicide Squad 2’ and that he’d be battling that team of black ops villains. There is no audio or video of the exchange though, so take that with a grain of salt for now. Dwayne Johnson was rumored to appear in that sequel as Black Adam but the latest buzz is that this plan has been scrapped. ‘Suicide Squad 2’ was expected to arrive in 2019, but reportedly the script is being rewritten so that sounds highly unlikely. Perhaps it is being retooled in order to replace Black Adam with Deathstroke, but either way, there’s really no chance that it will arrive before 2020 at the earliest.
It seems a lot of the ambitious plans for the DC Comics movies are stalling out, which is rough when writers, directors, and actors have already been pretty much locked in only to get strung along for years while Warner Brothers tries to figure out what audiences want out of their movies and where their past attempts went wrong.
At least Manganiello hasn’t outright walked away from the idea of playing Deathstroke. It just seems to be a matter of finding out which movie to place him in. Are you bummed that ‘Deathstroke’ doesn’t seem to be in the works for anytime soon?
Source: Comic Book Movie
