With a big-budget Joker movie just weeks away and a Penguin HBO series freshly unveiled, a few other DC villains are being targeted for the spotlight.
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Bane, the super-steroid injecting antagonist who was previously seen in the 2012 Christopher Nolan movie The Dark Knight Rises, and Deathstroke, another popular archnemesis in the comic book company’s fold, are being lassoed together for a movie. The James Gunn and Peter Safran-led DC Studios is developing a script from Matthew Orton, a scribe on the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World movie.
There is no director on the 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. The character was born and raised in a prison on a fictional Caribbean isle, a locale that allowed him to not only hone his brute fighting skills but also absorb the teachings from all manner of international criminals. He later was the subject of a horrific steroidal test, an experiment that left him incredibly strong but also addicted to serums.
The character made his mark in an epic storyline titled “Knightfall,” in which he brutally broke Batman’s back, a story that catapulted him to the upper rankings of Bat-villains. The character has appeared in numerous video games and TV series, and was notably portrayed by a muffled Tom Hardy in the final installment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises.
Deathstroke was first introduced in 1980 to be a top-tier villain for the Teen Titans, but the super-enhanced master assassin grew to become one of DC’s most popular bad guys, squaring off against Batman and the Justice League, and headlining his own comic title several times.
The character, created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez, has popped up in video games and animated fare; Esai Morales played the character in the recent live-action Titans series, while Joe Manganiello cameoed as the one-eyed killer in some of Zack Snyder’s DC movies. At one point, he was going to be the villain of The Batman, back when Ben Affleck was directing and starring. At another point, he was attached to star in a Deathstroke movie from The Raid director Gareth Evans.
DC and Warner Bros. have found considerable success in highlighting villains on the feature side. The most prominent of examples is Joker, with filmmaker Todd Phillips’ unique take on the Clown Prince of Crime propelling the movie to a $1 billion box office and Oscar gold for actor Joaquin Phoenix and composer Hildur Gudnadóttir. The sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opens Oct. 4.
Colin Farrell is starring The Penguin, a spinoff from Matt Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman. The eight-episode series has garnered strong reviews as it debuted Sept. 19 on HBO.
And antiheroine Harley Quinn found has been played by Margot Robbie in a trio of movies, including the 2021 Gunn-directed The Suicide Squad, which proved a winning combo for both character and actress.
But taking villains and making them compelling enough to lead a feature that audiences would want to sit through is a challenge. The first step, of course, is the writing.
Orton’s résumé is filled with grounded and gritty work involving criminals and killers. He received his first credit penning Operation Finale, the true-life drama that told of the plan to capture Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Chris Weitz directed the feature that starred Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley.
He also created Devil’s Peak, a serial killer crime miniseries made by South Africa’s DSTV, and has hostage thriller Cleaner, starring Clive Owen and Daisy Ridley, in the can. He earned a credit on Marvel’s Moon Knight TV show, and the company brought him back into the fold to pen reshoots for Captain America: Brave New World, which deals with terrorism. The movie opens Feb. 14, 2025.
Orton is repped by WME, Grandview and Johnson Shapiro.
