MAN OF STEEL Writer David Goyer Reveals The Studio's Worst Note Received and It Came From WB

David Goyer has worked on a lot of projects in his career and a lot of those projects were for DC and Warner Bros. He worked on scripts for films such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He also worked on Marvel’s Blade trilogy.

In a recent interview with THR, Goyer was asked what the worst studio note he ever received on one of his movies was, that doesn’t include the time he was told to “take the magic out” of the script for a Doctor Strange movie he was working on. His worst note came from Warner Bros. in his script for Man of Steel, and this is going to make you laugh. It just shows how brainless some of these studio executives can be.

“One note I got was on Man of Steel, where the ending involves Superman utilizing the pod that he arrived in as a child in order to bring down General Zod’s ship. The note we got from the studio said, ‘You have to change that.’ We asked why. They said, ‘Because if Superman uses that pod and it’s destroyed while saving the city, how is he ever going to get back home to Krypton?’ There was just this long pause and we said, ‘Krypton blew up. You saw 30 minutes of it!'”

Sometimes studios executives just don’t think. These are the people making millions of dollars running Hollywood! It makes me sad. Anyway, Goyer was then asked what the best studio note he ever received was, and that came from his work on the AppleTV+ series Foundation. He said:

“I actually received some pretty good notes from [Apple TV development head] Matt Cherniss — and I’m not just saying that because Foundation is a pending project. Early on in the process, I used to talk about how time is a character on the show. And we were twisting ourselves around the axle of trying to figure out, how do we deal with these complicated time jumps and slightly left-of-center story structures? And he just said, ‘Fuck it, just lean into it.’ So we broke with traditional story structures in various ways. The structure changes from episode to episode. Most of the time, studio executives say, ‘How do you make it more normal? How do you make it fall in line with what the audience would expect?’ He encouraged me to not do that, which was unusual.”

I love that, and this is why more and more filmmakers are making films and other projects for streaming services. They are actually giving the creators a lot more creative freedom and encouraging them to try new things and break the mold.