Zack Snyder Ignites DCEU Fan Base With New Deathstroke Image
The Justice League director is dishing out behind the scenes treasures from the DCEU.
Some DC fans are in their element this month because Zack Snyder just joined Instagram. The outspoken director almost immediately started posting a behind-the-scenes treasure trove from his career, including images from his time ruling the SnyderVerse. Inevitably, this has had an effect on those who would have loved to see more of Snyder’s work in the DCEU.
This week, Snyder uploaded a striking black-and-white image of Joe Manganiello as Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke, igniting his fan base with the usual calls for his return to the world of DC. Manganiello was originally supposed to star as the beloved villain in a solo Ben Affleck-led Batman movie that never happened, but he did briefly appear in both Justice League’s post-credits scene and Snyder’s notorious director’s cut of the film. However, it’s clear that Manganiello’s Deathstroke made enough of an impact to cause some fans a little pain when he popped up on their feeds.
Among the obligatory “#RestoreTheSnyderVerse” replies, one fan said, “We were robbed! I was so excited when I saw him in the post credit scene of JL 2017,” while another pleaded, “Please don’t give us hope.” Other fans added, “literally speechless” and “Would of (sic) loved to have seen that hypothetical Ben Affleck Batman movie with Deathstroke as the villain, Ben really did the ‘Dark Knight Returns’ version of the bat perfectly.”
“This I shot with my Leica monochrome and my modified 50mm dream lens by @zerooptik thank you @joemanganiello for being a perfect Deathstroke,” Snyder noted in the image’s caption.
Manganiello has previously spoken about Affleck’s lost Batman movie, which he compared to David Fincher’s The Game. “It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out,” he told Yahoo. “It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him.”
It wasn’t the first time that Manganiello danced with the comic book movie devil in the pale moonlight, as he’d been trying to land a big part in a superhero movie for quite a while before his brief stint as Deathstroke, even joining the cast of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie back in the day, although not in the role he’d hoped for.
“I did my Peter Parker thing,” he recalled of his audition for the wall-crawler before he ended up with the part of school bully Flash Thompson. “I brought glasses and a button-down shirt, and tried to be nerdy. I knew I was never going to get the role. Who’s going to bully me? I was 6’5” and 220 pounds!”
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Kirsten Howard has paid their dues. Yes sir, the check is in the mail.