Joe Manganeillo Reveals Original Plans For Deathstroke In Ben Affleck’s ‘The Batman’

Ben Affleck’s The Batman will go down in history as one of the great films that never happened.

Like Tim Burton’s Superman Lives, George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal and Darren Aronofsky’s Batman: Year One before it— Affleck’s The Batman is one of Warner Bros shelved DC projects fans would love to have seen make the light of day.

After Josstice League failed to set the box office alight and internal interference with his movie, Affleck hung up his cape and cowl. One of the casualties of the movie being shelved was True Blood star Joe Manganeillo, who was introduced as Deathstroke at the end of Josstice League.

The actor recently spoke with Yahoo! and shared some details about the film, and how it drawed comparisons to David Fincher thriller The Game, that would have saw Deathstroke tear apart Bruce Wayne’s life piece by piece.

“There were similarities to 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. 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.”

Manganeillo also said that Snyder’s original post-credit scene in Justice League was to introduce Deathstroke to set up Affleck’s The Batman, but when Joss Whedon came aboard his scene was reworked to set up Josstice League 2.

“They reshot all of Jesse’s (Eisenberg) dialogue to tease Justice League Part 2, which was going to be about the Injustice League. All of that dialogue was about Batman originally, and it was changed to lines like ‘Shouldn’t we have a league of our own?”

Snyder’s original plan was to have Darkseid as the main villain in the sequel and not the Injustice League.

Manganeillo was also set to star in his own solo Deathstroke film, with The Raid’s Gareth Evans once onboard to direct at one point. Touched on how he had worked on a good few treatments for the film. But ultimately shelved with Warner Bros reshuffle.

“I worked with an Oscar-nominated writer on that treatment, and it was one of those projects that got canceled during that period. There were maybe seven different Deathstroke projects that all didn’t happen over the course of four years. It’s one of those funny things in Hollywood and in life where you’ve just got to let it go.”

Some good has came out of it however, as Zack Snyder has been given the opportunity to finish his original vision and he called Manganeillo up to shoot some additional photography.

Heroes & Villains can put their differences aside for an important cause… https://t.co/bu2ldmhUUq#UsUnited #AFSP

📷: @ZackSnyder pic.twitter.com/0WO6ixaWHd

— JOE MANGANIELLO (@JoeManganiello) November 19, 2020

“Zack called me one day and asked, ‘How’d you like to do it again?’ So I said, ‘Sure, man, I’ll be there.’ And he told me, ‘OK, we’re getting your armor out of storage in England, and we’re going to fly it over here. Is there anything you want to do differently?”

After working on a few treatments for Deathstroke, Manganeillo had ideas and he shared them with Zack, who was really supportive.

“The greatest warriors are the ones who walk into battle already dead or assuming that they’re going to die — they’re looking for someone who could actually kill them. There’s almost an excitement around that, like ‘Is today going to be the day?’ So there was a climatic moment in my standalone story where I wanted Slade to shave his head into this war-like Mohawk knowing that he was going off to his own death. I said to Zack, ‘I always envisioned him with a big white Mohawk,’ and he was totally down for it.”

Ultimately, Manganeillo hopes this makes fans interest in the character and it revives his chances of a Deathstroke standalone.

“Hopefully this will reinvigorate interest from the fans as far as wanting to see this version of the character get told. We landed on an origin story that everyone I’ve ever pitched it to has gone crazy for. There’s been so many versions of this character over the years, and I just wanted to put my own stink on him.”

Joe, fans would love to see it. Trust me on that. We hope Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the catalyst that starts reverting to the original ideas that was in store for us when the DCEU began.

https://t.co/0NsNzCtGip

— Ben Affleck (@BenAffleck) August 29, 2016

SOURCE | Yahoo!