A lot of interesting news about the DC Universe came out on Monday, and one odd, out of date story stood out — Warner Bros. Pictures tried to get a standalone Superman movie going in 2022 starring Henry Cavill, and directed by Michael Bay. The Transformers director has never straight-up superhero movie before, but two insiders told The Wrap that this deal was on the table at some point in 2022. Interestingly, that same year, Bay told ComicBook that he would like to do a superhero movie, but not in a massive ongoing franchise. That leaves the question of what his DCEU contribution would have looked like, and why it fell through.
Monday’s report on Superman and the DCU dedicated some time to the history of DC Comics adaptations on the big screen and the attempts to merge that legacy with the successful model of the MCU thriving today. The report noted all the changes behind the scenes at Warner Bros. in recent years, particularly as the executives overseeing DC has changed. In 2022, DC Films was briefly under the control of Warner Bros. Pictures heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, right between the departure of Walter Hamada and the introduction of James Gunn and Peter Safran.
During that time, it hadn’t been decided that the DCEU would be overhauled in favor of a new continuity. De Luca and Abdy were hoping to put up a simple, standalone Superman movie in the meantime, without all the tie-ins and crossovers a massive Justice League-type production would require. They reportedly had Bay in mind to direct, but it’s unclear how far this deal went.
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It’s all the more surprising because that same year, Bay told us: “It’s not that I’m not interested in Marvel. “As Ridley Scott says, the most complicated thing for a director and the most fun thing for a director is to build the world. I’m not the guy to go into Lucas’ Star Wars and do Star Wars 5. That’s not me. I’m not the one to come into Iron Man 7. I’m not the one to do Batman 10. I want to do my own thing. I would love to do a superhero thing but I want to do it on my own terms and create my own world.”
That makes him sound like a poor fit for the DCEU, which at the time already had ten movies with a lot of established continuity between them. However, it’s possible that De Luca and Abdy planned to give Bay the latitude he was looking for with a “soft reboot” approach, allowing him freedom from the franchise without recasting Cavill. This was a popular idea among DC fans at the time following the success of disconnected movies like Joker and The Batman.
Instead, Zaslav took over Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022 and hired Gunn and Safran to lead the newly-restructured DC Studios. It’s taken some time to get their DCU going, but it finally hits the big screen this summer with Superman on July 25th.
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