Warner Bros. announced today that they have canceled production on Ava DuVernay’s DC movie New Gods.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. blamed the cancelation on Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
DC cancels New Gods
Warner Bros. and DC Films announced that they canceled the Ava DuVernay movie New Gods.
“As part of our DC slate, some legacy development titles including New Gods and The Trench will not be moving forward,” Warner Bros. and DC said in a statement.
“The projects will remain in their skillful hands if they were to move forward in the future.”
DuVernay, who was the first Black female director to receive an Oscar nomination (Selma, 2014) had been developing the movie with writer Tom King since 2018.
The movie was set to bring the characters created by comic book legend Jack Kirby to the big screen for the first time.
DuVernay took to Twitter to talk about losing the opportunity, saying that “Diving into Kirby’s Fourth World was the adventure of a lifetime. That can’t be taken away.”
The word behind the scenes is that New Gods was canceled because it would feature Darkseid in a major role. The problem was that Darkseid was just in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and since Snyder’s world has ended, DC didn’t want to bring the character back this soon.
THR reported that there was “a desire to have space between the latter and any new appearances.”
Who are the New Gods?
In her Twitter post, DuVernay mentioned several of the New Gods, including Barda, Scott, Granny, Highfather and The Furies.
Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics in 1970 after co-creating several popular characters, including Captain America, The Avengers, Black Panther, Doctor Doom, The Fantastic Four, Nick Fury, Hulk, Iron Man, Marvel’s Thor, and the X-Men.
When he went to rival DC Comics, he created the New Gods.
These celestial beings are natives of the twin planets of New Genesis and Apokolips. If Apokolips sounds familiar, that is where Darkseid is from, and it was Jack Kirby in this series that created Darkseid.
New Genesis is the idyllic world and Apokolips is the nightmare world and the two sides were always at odds.
While existing in their own pocket of the DC Universe, the New Gods often interacted with the regular Earth-bound heroes, specifically the villain Darkseid.
The DCEU has referenced the New Gods in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and introduced some of them in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
The main villain in Ava DuVernay’s New Gods movie was going to be Darkseid and it was also going to feature the Female Furies, a group of superpowered women who served Darkseid.