The gritty darkness of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is palpable through all of the movie’s trailers. Expect things to be on the lighter side for Justice League Part One, according to the writer of both films. Chris Terrio — the Oscar-winning scribe of Argo — co-wrote the upcoming Dawn of Justice with Man of Steel’s David Goyer and explained the shift between the two projects.
“Batman v Superman is a bit of an Empire Strikes Back or Two Towers or any similar middle film in a trilogy. The middle film tends to be the darkest one. I do think from Man of Steel through Justice League, it is one saga really,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
“I expect Justice League will be tonally not quite as dark as Batman v Superman. From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit.”
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Terrio, who almost didn’t take on Justice League, also said he might not draw up the screenplay for Part Two, explaining that the two DC adaptations have “been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life”:
“For Batman v Superman, I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology,” Terrio continued. “For Justice League, I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench. If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies, I would say you were crazy. But I do think fans deserve that.”
Read TerrioÂ’s full interview at The Wall Street Journal.
Dawn of Justice opens March 25. Justice League Part One begins shooting April 11