DC Films cancels New Gods movie, pivoting away from the Snyderverse

DC Films shelves its upcoming Aquaman spin-off The Trench as well as Ava DuVernay’s New Gods, bad news for fans hoping to #RestoreTheSnyderVerse.

Variety reports today that DC Films has cancelled two future films in the DC Cinematic Universe: New Gods, a movie about Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” characters directed by Ava DuVernay, and The Trench, an Aquaman spin-off from director James Wan.

I can’t say I’m too broken up about The Trench, which would have followed a group of fish monsters glimpsed briefly in 2018’s Aquaman. New Gods looked intriguing, though. The New Gods live on the twin planets of New Genesis and Apokolips, the latter of which is ruled by the tyrannical Darkseid, who featured in the recently released Zack Snyder’s Justice League. With that movie a hit on HBO Max, you’d figure DC might want to lean into it (also DuVernay is a talented director), but it looks like the studio is looking to move on instead.

In fact, you could argue the writing has been on the wall for a while, as DC has been retiring the remnants of the universe Zack Snyder set up with 2013’s Man of Steel. Robert Pattinson will play a new Batman in The Batman. We’ve heard of a new Superman project in the works sans Henry Cavill. There’s a third Wonder Woman movie on the way with Gal Gadot, but the studio has made it clear that it will be the third and final movie in a trilogy. Ezra Miller will be back in a solo Flash movie starring Erza Miller (complete with Ben Affleck for one more movie as Batman), but most likely to reset the whole DCEU and try something else.

Overall, it looks like the team is moving ahead with plans to make a superhero universe a little more decentralized that the one over at Marvel, where everything is presided over by mastermind Kevin Feige. Given how hard Warner Bros. failed when they tried to ape Marvel’s style with the past several movies, I can’t say it’s a bad idea. “We want different voices in the mix,” WarnerMedia Studios CEO Ann Sarnoff said recently. “For certain fans that want singular voices, they may be disappointed, but we would ask them to be patient and see what we’ve got in store because perhaps the newer voices in the mix will have just as compelling stories to tell.”

The next DC movie, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which itself is something of a reboot of a panned 2016 film, comes out on August 6, 2021.

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