Warner Bros. has a lot riding on Justice League. After the first three movies in the DCEU were met with mixed critical responses, the team-up pic was meant to hit the same heights as this year’s Wonder Woman. Unfortunately for the studio, however, Justice League has not only received a lot of harsh reviews, but might also underperform at the box office and fail to match up to Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok.
In the wake of this, WB will have to do some serious thinking about what direction to take the DCEU down in future. They still haven’t announced anything in regards to that just yet, but according to The Ankler, the studio are considering ditching the emphasis on the Justice League characters altogether and focusing on what they know works: Wonder Woman and her mythos.
“There’s all sorts of scuttlebutt about the way forward for DC post-League: that Whedon’s Batgirl is…unthinkable at this point; that they’ll now turn the whole thing over to James Wan if Aquaman goes well; that they might just make it a Wonder Woman universe. There are wheels within wheels within wheels in every turn of the Warners studio this week and we’ll see where it all lands soon enough. Or more likely, not soon enough.”
Previously, we’ve heard that the Batman mythology would be a major driving force for the DCEU going forward. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, probably because Batman himself, Ben Affleck, is expected to be on his way out of the franchise. Likewise, this report also claims that Joss Whedon’s Batgirl won’t happen, after all. Maybe WB lost faith in the former Avengers director after his Justice League cut didn’t provide what they were hoping for?
With Zack Snyder not making any further movies and Whedon failing to stick around, that leaves the position of the foremost director of the universe vacant. As this report suggests, James Wan might be about to fill the role if Aquaman manages to succeed when it arrives on December 21, 2018. If it does, does that mean we’ll get a load of Aquaman-related films, too?
Perhaps, but until those all important box office numbers for Justice League roll in, don’t expect to hear anything more about the future of the DCEU.