We're still over two years out from the Batman vs. Superman (sure, it may not have a final agreed upon title, but I think that does the job for now), but, unsurprisingly, the excitement is high for the long awaited cinematic team up of the two comic icons (with Wonder Woman, and possibly The Flash thrown in for good measure). Also unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. have entered information lock down, but that didn't stop director Zach Snyder, returning after Man of Steel, from speaking to Forbes about what made them decide on putting The Dark Knight int the sequel. "After Man of Steel finished and we started talking about what would be in the next movie, I started subtly mentioning that it would be cool if he faced Batman", he said, "In the first meeting, it was like 'Maybe Batman?' Maybe at the end of the second movie, some Kryptonite gets delivered to Bruce Wayne's house or something. Like in a cryptic way, that's the first time we see him".
Considering Warner Bros. announced the movie with an image of the S shield inside the bat symbol, that cameo approach was soon thrown out. "But then, once you say it out loud, right? You're in story meeting talking about, like, who should Superman fight if he fought this giant alien threat Zod, who was basically his equal physically, from his planet, fighting on out turf. You know, who to fight next? But I'm not going to say at all that when I took the job to do Man of Steel that I did it in a subversive way to get to Batman. I really believe that only after contemplating who could face Superman did Batman come into the picture." He further went on about seeing the costumes for the first time, and his excitement of seeing these two icons stand beside each other. "The thing also that's really fascinating for me is that, even just in the tests we've bee doing, the costumes, right? You basically have Batman and Superman - and this without Ben (Affleck) and Henry (Cavill) in the costumes, but just like the stand-ins, just testing to see what the costumes look like. And you have them standing there and they're standing in the same spot - and then we have Wonder Woman, you know, all three of three of them in the same shot. Even just for a test, you really have to go, 'Wow, that's Crazy!' Not only is it the first time that I'm seeing them, it's the first time they've ever existed on screen in a movie. Even just Batman and Superman standing next to each other.... It's kind of epic. It's crazy. But it's fun."
It's not surprising that Snyder would want to get Batman in there somewhere, since he was quite vocal a few years back, before Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy finished, about how he wanted to adapt Frank Miller's classic story The Dark Knight Returns, a future tale about the the Dark Knight coming out of retirement, for the big screen (he does cite the book as a major influence on the sequel, even announcing it with a line of dialogue from the book's final issue.) While we do have our gripes about The Man of Steel here, at least Snyder has respect and enthusiasm for the characters going into this sequel, and makes me feel a little bit better about it.
Batman vs. Superman opens on the 6th of May 2016.
