Why These Characters Were Left Out Of DC Movies

We're used to the hero facing off against his primary nemesis in their first movie. It's Joker facing the Dark Knight in 1989's Batman, Lex Luthor is Superman's enemy in 1978's Superman, and the Red Skull clashes with Captain America in 2011's Captan America: The First Avenger. So it was natural for fans to expect Black Adam to show up in 2019's Shazam! Not only is the ancient Egyptian warrior Shazam's arch-nemesis in the comics, but by the time the film was released it was already widely reported that Dwayne Johnson had been cast as Black Adam in an upcoming solo film. 

Speaking after the release of Shazam!, director David F. Sandberg said that including Teth-Adam was widely discussed, but ultimately it was decided that bringing him into the movie would crowd the other characters. Sandberg said he had weekly discussions with Geoff Johns (who was still DC's Chief Creative Officer at the time), screenwriter Henry Gayden, and the studio. "They felt like [including Black Adam] was just too much for one movie, and they wanted to focus on just giving Shazam the space for his origin." He went on to say keeping Black Adam created more opportunities for the other characters. "Like 'if we don't use Black Adam how can we give Sivana more space, and what would the story be?'"

Considering Shazam!'s critical and financial success, it's a good bet we'll get to see Billy Batson and Teth-Adam duke it out sooner or later.

Gene Hackman played the egomaniac Lex Luthor in Superman, the follow-up Superman II, and the disastrous flop Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. But there's a number missing there. While Richard Pryor made an appearance as Gus Gorman in the third film, Gene Hackman's Luthor was nowhere to be found. 

Hackman didn't show up again until Superman IV because he was unhappy with producers Alexander and Ilya Saskind. Both producers had clashed with Richard Donner, who directed Superman and most of Superman II. According to Glen Weldon's 2013 book Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, once the Salkinds fired Donner and replaced with him Richard Lester, important members of the crew walked off the film in protest and Hackman joined them. While all of Hackman's principal photography for Superman II was complete, he still had reshoots scheduled which he refused to return for. Body and voice doubles filled in for the actor, and when it was time to make Superman III, Hackman gave it a hard pass.

So why did he show up for Superman IV? After Superman III, the Salkinds sold the Superman movie rights to Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan of Cannon Films. Presumably, with the Salkinds no longer involved, Hackman was more open to return. Considering how horrible Reeves' final Superman film proved to be, maybe Hackman should've just stayed away regardless.

Chris O'Donnell played Dick Grayson, a.k.a. Robin, Batman's sidekick, in 1995's Batman Forever and its franchise-killing follow-up 1997's Batman & Robin. But before O'Donnell's casting — in fact, before he would make his first appearance on the popular sketch comedy show In Living Color – Marlon Wayans was cast as Robin in 1992's Batman Returns. 

Of course, if you've seen the film then you might be confused, since neither Wayans nor anyone else playing Robin shows up in Batman Returns. In a 1998 interview with the AV Club (via CBR), Wayans confirmed he was originally meant to be in the movie as Robin. "I got my wardrobe fitted and everything," Wayans said, "and what happened was that there were too many characters, and they felt Robin wouldn't be of service." Robin's introduction was pushed back to the third film, at which point directors changed from Tim Burton to Joel Schumacher. Wayans said once that happened, "their vision of the project changed. They decided they wanted somebody white to play Robin."

Wayans also confirmed he was paid in spite of never showing up on the screen. "They paid me, and then they decided they wanted somebody else," Wayans said. "I was like, 'Hey, as long as the check clears, baby.'"

One of our biggest unanswered questions about Birds of Prey was where Batman was during the events depicted in the flick. The film's rather explosive and violent events — including Harley Quinn destroying Ace Chemicals, raiding a GCPD precinct, and the final battle between the Birds of Prey and Black Mask's thugs — are exactly the kind of things you'd think would attract the Dark Knight's attention. 

You could make up any number of narrative reasons for his absence. You could say he was out of town on Justice League business, he was recovering from a Bane-induced backache, or maybe he was kidnapped by the Penguin and was getting worked over by his thugs.

But there were fairly glaring real-world reasons for the lack of Batman. In February 2019, Ben Affleck confirmed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that he would not be reprising the role of Batman. Soon afterward, Robert Pattinson of Twilight fame was announced as the lead for the upcoming The Batman. With a whole host of new characters being introduced in Birds of Prey and Pattinson not yet established as the Dark Knight in any other movies, the team film would've been an awkward time to have audiences meet the new Batman — especially since he wouldn't be part of the team.

In 1989's Batman, Billy Dee Williams appears as Gotham City's new district attorney Harvey Dent. Any comics fans watching the film immediately understood the implication — that the villain Two-Face would be showing up at some point. But 1992's Batman Returns came and went without the birth of Two-Face or even the unscarred Harvey Dent. The absence left some fans theorizing that the Batman Returns villain Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) was a replacement for Dent.

In 2015 CBR's Brian Cronin looked into the matter on his "Movie Legends Revealed" feature, and determined that the real reason for Dent's absence was Tim Burton's dissatisfaction with Sam Hamm's Batman script. The director was apparently not happy with the story of the first film, so for the sequel he brought in other writers to rewrite Hamm's work. Their marching orders were to making Batman Returns as different from Batman as possible.

One of those writers, Daniel Waters, said he toyed with the idea of teasing Two-Face — "I had flirted with, just in a very small subplot, having Harvey Dent start to come back and just have one scene of him where he flips a coin and it's the good side of the coin, and he decides not to do anything, so you had to wait for the next movie for him to actually do something." But since Burton wanted Batman Returns to have as little to do with the first film as possible and Harvey Dent was in the first film, Waters jettisoned the idea. 

Considering how blatantly his coming was implied at the end of 2016's Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, it probably didn't surprise anybody to learn that Zack Snyder's original version of Justice League would have included the appearance of the powerful villain Darkseid. On one of his installments of Fatman on Batman, Kevin Smith dished on some of the inside info. According to Smith, Darkseid would have appeared twice in the film — first as part of a vision of the future Superman has similar to the one Batman experiences in Dawn of Justice, and then at the end of the film when Steppenwolf would have been killed by Darkseid for failing to defeat Earth's heroes.

There's never been official word on why so much was changed between Snyder's version of Justice League and Joss Whedon taking over, so the best we can do is speculate. 

First, Darkseid might have been jettisoned because of concerns he'd be seen as a Thanos ripoff — a concern that might have been heightened because of Joss Whedon's involvement in both Justice League and Avengers. Second, there was the growing perception that the DCEU films were too dark. Not only is Darkseid a pretty dark character, the word "dark" is literally part of his name. Third and finally, Warner Bros. seems to be gradually distancing itself from the idea of a shared narrative like Marvel's, and according to Smith the villain's entire role in Justice League would have been to tease future chapters of that narrative.