Warner Bros. Cancels The New Gods and The Trench

Darkseid’s appearance in Zack Snyder’s Justice League reportedly led to Warner Bros. dropping Ava DuVernay’s New Gods, while James Wan’s The Trench was canceled due to the belief Aquaman’s sequel was enough for that franchise.

Movies are coming with the DC characters but the WB made it clear it was the end of the Snyderverse or Zack Snyder’s vision of the DC Universe. After congratulating the fan-driven release of Snyders’ Justice league WarnerMedia CEO Ann Sarnoff said We are glad we did this trilogy for Zack Snyder.” She continued the release of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” will complete the director’s superhero trilogy, reinforcing the studio’s desire to move past the social media campaign to hand back control of the DC film universe to the filmmaker.

“We’ve got an incredible group of creators — television series creators, Max series creators, feature film creators — who are basically broadening the base of the talent that we work with on DC because we’re so excited about the potential to build out the DC multiverse. It’s one of the reasons why I was hired almost two years ago. The before-and-after was it was a very siloed organization with no connectivity between the businesses. DC was being developed, but in a kind of monolithic way in each division. My mantra coming in was to make it bigger and broader and we really want to surprise and delight the fans with more connective tissue across the various media and platforms. I’m talking movies, HBO Max, television, and our games division.”

She later said that some of the WB executives have received threats for not endorsing the Snyder Cut or for being perceived as standing in the way of its release. Which was a lead to this statement.

“We’re not tolerating any of that. That behavior is reprehensible no matter what franchise you’re talking about or what business you’re talking about. It’s completely unacceptable. I’m very disappointed in the fans that have chosen to go to that negative place with regard to DC, with regard to some of our executives. It’s just disappointing because we want this to be a safe place to be. We want DC to be a fandom that feels safe and inclusive. We want people to be able to speak up for the things they love, but we don’t want it to be a culture of canceling things that any small faction isn’t happy with. We are not about that. We are about positivity and celebration.”

“I appreciate that they love Zack’s work and we are very thankful for his many contributions to DC. We’re just so happy that he could bring his cut of the “Justice League” to life because that wasn’t in the plan until about a year ago. With that comes the completion of his trilogy. We’re very happy we’ve done this, but we’re very excited about the plans we have for all the multi-dimensional DC characters that are being developed right now.”

About the new projects:


“It’s super important to me and it’s in line with what we want to do. We want to branch out and let creators interpret parts of the universe in unique and special ways. Ta-Nehisi working on Superman is incredibly exciting, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, and [director] Andy Muschietti on “The Flash” or Patty Jenkins. Matt Reeves just finished filming “The Batman” against the odds of COVID. We’re so excited to finish that movie and have people see it because Matt’s take on Batman is different than other takes. Even familiar characters have lots of possibilities.”

So it is clear that as far as WarnerMedia CEO Ann Sarnoff is concerned they are finished with any Snyder-driven stories or movies in the future but she is promising some wonderful new versions of the DC characters in movies and media presentations that she thinks the fans will love. I can see she is not in the same class as Kevin Feige in the knowledge of superheroes and I personally am not confident in the direction DC Films is going but that still remains to be seen.

One Thought to “Warner Bros. Cancels The New Gods and The Trench”

  1. Walt

    I don’t blame you for a negative comment with a name like visoredavenger it was inevitable.

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