By The long-delayed Justice League Dark movie has (another) director, bringing the supernatural superhero team one step closer to appearing on the big screen.
THR reports that Doug Liman, director of Edge of Tomorrow and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, has been tapped by Warner Bros. to helm the movie, which sees more mystically-minded DC characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Zatanna teaming up to take on threats that are too magical or macabre for the mainline Justice League to tackle. Michael Gilio is writing the script.
The movie will (presumably) adapt the comic series of the same name that first launched in 2011 and has pretty much been in various states of development since 2012. Dark was originally announced as a directorial vehicle for Guillermo del Toro, a guy who is famed for having both a great sense of the macabre and having about 100 prospective directing gigs at any given time. He was attached to the film up until last summer, when Warner Bros. announced he’d no longer be directing it. The status of the project has been in a sort of limbo (heh) until then.
Of course, we can muse all day on the irony of a movie called Justice League Dark taking place in a version of the DC Universe that’s already about as grimy and dark and depressing as you can get, but the title can be a bit of a misnomer. The comic the movie takes inspiration from definitely had a “gritty, serious people doing gritty, serious things to get the job done” vibe, but the title more referred to the supernatural angle of the book more than anything. Any book starring the ghost of a circus acrobat and the plant man is kind of inherently silly from the start – but, then again, the same thing could be said of a movie featuring a billionaire in a bat costume and a dude from Kansas who can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and we all saw how Batman v Superman turned out.