THE RAID Director Gareth Evans Shares His Plan For His Unmade DEATHSTROKE Movie

I’m sure you all remember that Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment were planning to make a Deathstroke spinoff movie. They even set the character up in the DCEU with Joe Manganiello playing the role. A lot of fans were actually excited about the movie, but all that changed after Justice League was released.

The Raid director Gareth Evans was attached to direct the Deathstroke film, which was super exciting. He would have made one hell of a badass action-packed film! But, at this point, we don’t know if the movie is going to happen. But, during a recent interview with Yahoo, Evans offered some new insight into what his movie might have looked like.

He was planning a “Shakespearean” take on Deathstroke’s origin that would have drawn inspiration from international movies and it would have been a shorter film. The filmmaker explained:

“The plan was, I wanted to tell something that would be a lean story, that would be kind of an origin of that character. Something that felt like it could be 100 minutes or 110 minutes long, max – not to go over the two hour period with it.

“Back then, I was massively influenced by the noir films coming out of South Korea, so that was my pitch. I was like, these films are amazing: the texture, and the tones of colours, the grit and the aggression of them is super interesting to use to tell Deathstroke’s story.”

I would have loved to see how Evans’ vision of this film would have turned out. He seemed to be headed in a direction that I think fans would have dug. Evans goes on to say that he thinks it still might be possible for the movie to get made, he just doesn’t know when.

“We had some pretty bold ideas there that could have been really visceral and really fun. But, yeah, I don’t know. Who knows? They might come back again in five or ten years time, you never know. I don’t know what exactly happened. There might have been a change of personnel, as happens quite a lot in big U.S. studios. I think that project just stopped being a priority for them. It never really went further than two or three phone calls. I’ve never heard anything since, so I just presumed that project was either on the back burner somewhere, or someone else might be doing it.”

What do you think about the direction that Gareth Evans wanted to take his Deathstroke movie? Do you think we’ll ever see a Deathstroke movie at this point?