Anna Daniels
For those with short memories (or those who didn’t stick around for Justice League‘s credits), it’s worth noting there were, in fact, two end-credit scenes. The first featured a light-hearted race between Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ezra Miller’s Flash. The second was far more ominous, and featured Jesse Eisenberg’s supervillain Lex Luthor living the high life on a yacht in a tropical paradise. It also saw a masked man DC fans immediately recognized as Deathstroke boarding the ship, and apparently being recruited by Luthor to join his burgeoning alliance of supervillains.
Joe Manganiello was indeed the man behind Deathstroke’s mask. The iconic villain’s unexpected entry into the DCEU was clearly a welcome surprise for fans who stuck around to witness it, if only because it appeared to signal big things were on the cinematic horizon for the murderous mercenary. Seems part of the original plan was not only to posit the villain as the primary antagonist in the now scrapped Ben Affleck Batman flick, but also to give Manganiello’s Deathstroke his own movie. Those plans are obviously iffy at best these days.
While the presumably Whedon-helmed scene with Lex Luthor didn’t derail that possibility, Snyder clearly had great ambitions for the nefarious Deathstroke. Given the villain’s particularly tricky history with the Dark Knight, it’s one that likely would’ve sent the Bat-fandom into a frenzy, particularly as Deathstroke is one of the more major DC baddies who had never appeared on the big screen in live action.
Bringing the character in via full-on fisticuffs with Batman would not only have been a cinematic sight to be hold, but also a firm promise of more solo Batman action to come. Now that we know the footage is apparently out there, it would seem almost criminal of Snyder not to include it in his new cut of Justice League, even if that full-on big screen Batfleck-Deathstroke clash is never to be.
Written by: Looper
