With the big-budget Joker movie set to be released in a few weeks and Penguin’s new HBO series on the horizon, several other DC villains are making their way into the spotlight.
Sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Bane, the super-steroid-injected antagonist who previously appeared in Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, and Death, another popular comic book company nemesis, The strokes are said to be lassoed together. movie. DC Studios, led by James Gunn and Peter Safran, is developing a script from Matthew Orton, the screenwriter behind the upcoming film Captain America: Brave New World.
There is no director for this project.
Bane is a relatively recent addition to Batman’s rogues gallery, with writer Chuck Dixon and artist Graham Nolan creating him in the early 1990s. This character was born and raised in a prison on a fictional Caribbean island. Here, he not only honed his brutal fighting skills, but also absorbed lessons from international criminals of all kinds. He was then subjected to a terrifying steroid test, which made him incredibly strong, but also made him addicted to the serum.
The character made his name in an epic story titled “Knightfall,” in which he brutally broke Batman’s back, a story that catapulted him into the upper ranks of Bat-villains. The character has appeared in numerous video games and television series, most notably in The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, where he was played by a raspy-voiced Tom Hardy.
Deathstroke first appeared in 1980 as a top-level villain in the Teen Titans, but the super-enhanced master assassin has grown to become one of DC’s most popular villains, facing off against Batman and the Justice League, and The title of his own comic made headlines several times.
The character, created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez, has appeared in video games and animated works. Esai Morales played the character in the recent live-action Titans series, and Joe Manganiello made cameos as the one-eyed killer in several of Zack Snyder’s DC films. At one point, Ben Affleck was slated to be the villain in Batman when he was directing and starring. At another point, he was cast in The Raid director Gareth Evans’ Deathstroke movie.
DC and Warner Bros. have had considerable success in highlighting their villains in terms of feature films. The most notable example is Joker, in which filmmaker Todd Phillips gave a unique take on the clown prince of crime, and the film reached $1 billion at the box office, co-starring actor Joaquin Phoenix and Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir won an Oscar gold medal. The sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opens on October 4th.
Colin Farrell is starring in Matt Reeves’ 2022 Batman spin-off, The Penguin. The eight-episode series aired on HBO on September 19th to critical acclaim.
And anti-heroine Harley Quinn has been played by Margot Robbie in three films, including 2021’s Suicide Squad, a winning combo for both the role and the actress.
But it’s difficult to introduce a villain and make him convincing enough to lead a feature-length movie that makes viewers want to keep watching until the end. The first step, of course, is to write.
Orton’s resume is full of down-to-earth, grueling work with criminals and murderers. He earned his first credit writing Operation Finale, a true story drama about the plot to capture Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Directed by Chris Weitz and starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley.
He is also the creator of the serial killer crime miniseries Devil’s Peak, produced by South Africa’s DSTV, and the hostage thriller The Cleaner, starring Clive Owen and Daisy Ridley. He earned a credit on Marvel’s TV show “Moon Knight,” and the company brought him back into the team for reshoots of “Captain America: Brave New World,” which dealt with terrorism. The movie will be released on February 14, 2025.
Orton is repped by WME, Grandview and Johnson Shapiro.