The DCEU has become infamous for announcing countless projects before proceeding to do absolutely nothing with them, but very rarely would the franchise cancel any outright. Unfortunately, that was the fate that befell both Aquaman spinoff The Trench and Ava DuVernay’s New Gods a few months back, even if the latter didn’t come as much of a surprise.
After all, the project had been in development since March 2018, and during that time it never seemed to gain any serious momentum. Almost an entire year had passed since the last update on New Gods, and that was pretty vague in itself after DuVernay confirmed she’d finished the fourth draft of the script alongside co-writer Tom King.
The filmmaker already had a stacked plate with HBO’s The Battle of Versailles and DMZ, The CW’s Naomi and Netflix documentary Colin in Black & White, so piling on a comic book blockbuster was a big ask. However, we’re hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Ben Affleck was returning as Batman in The Flash long before it was confirmed – that New Gods could be resurrected as a streaming series.
HBO Max is doubling down on DC content, and content to lean into the more supernatural and fantastical side of the comic book lore as evidenced by projects like Justice League Dark and Constantine, so it would make sense for New Gods to be refitted as an episodic endeavor in many respects.
Conspiracy theories abounded that the film was canned because Zack Snyder’s Justice League had just introduced Darkseid and Warner Bros. wanted to move as far away from that era as possible, but big budget fantasy has always proven massively popular on both network TV and streaming, so conspiracies be damned.