Chris Terrio Says He Might Not Write ‘Justice League: Part Two’

Most of the build-up to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has focused on star Ben Affleck and his new version of Batman, the introduction of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) to the DC Movie Universe, and the direction of Zack Snyder. There hasn’t been a ton written about or with Chris Terrio, the film’s co-screenwriter who won an Oscar for his work on the script for Affleck’s Argo. But in a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Terrio discussed his work on the film, and on the larger series of DC movies he’s contributing to.

Most notably, while Terrio discussed his screenplay for Justice League: Part One, he also revealed that he “won’t necessarily” write the screenplay for Part Two (You’re getting two Justice League movies for the price of, well, two, from Warner Bros. and Snyder.) Terrio also revealed some of the thematic underpinnings to his Batman v Superman and Justice League writing:

This has been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life. For ‘Batman v Superman,’ I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology. For ‘Justice League,’ I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench.

“If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies,” Terrio added, “I would say you were crazy.” (I would too!)

The other part that will probably excite DC fans (and maybe give pause to DC agnostics) came when Terrio compared Batman v Superman to The Empire Strikes Back; in other words, the dark middle chapter of a mega-trilogy (with Man of Steel and Justice League). Granted, there are two Justice League movies, which sorta sours the whole trilogy thing, but you get the idea.

Click over to WSJ for the full interview. Batman v Superman opens on March 25.