DC Films and Warner Bros. have announced that two projects are not going forward. Both Ava DuVernay’s New Gods and James Wan’s The Trench have been halted.
In a joint statement, both parties said, “As part of our DC slate, some legacy development titles including New Gods and The Trench will not be moving forward. We thank our partners Ava DuVernay, Tom King, James Wan and Peter Safran for their time and collaboration during this process and look forward to our continued partnership with them on other DC stories. The projects will remain in their skillful hands if they were to move forward in the future.”
As The Hollywood Reporter states in their exclusive report, “The projects are being shelved but like many comic characters, could come to life down the road. DC Films, led by president Walter Hamada, is leaving the door open to revisit these properties in the future, but insiders note that when it became clear the upcoming DC slate did not have a natural spot for New Gods or The Trench over the next few years, execs believed it was best not to leave the filmmakers hanging in development without a clear end in sight. New Gods, which would have been a sprawling tale, was complicated by the fact that its villain, Darkseid, just appeared as a major foil in Zack Snyder’s Justice League and there was a desire to have space between the latter and any new appearances.”
New Gods was set to be DuVernay’s second $100 million-budgeted movie. Created by the iconic comic book artist Jack Kirby himself, the first The New Gods comic was released in 1971. The most recent was released in 2011.
More information on The New Gods from DC: The New Gods are exactly that—they’re new gods. They came into existence after the world of the old gods, the gods of classical mythology, was destroyed during Ragnarok. The world of these known deities was split and became two separate planets, forever linked, but utterly different. One is called New Genesis and the other is Apokolips.
These worlds are referred to as twins, but the reality is that they couldn’t be or look more different. New Genesis is a lush green paradise, while Apokolips is a scorched, nightmarish landmarked by massive fire pits. Both these worlds exist outside of the DC Multiverse, meaning the Apokolips on Earth Prime is the same one as on Earth-2. So when the forces of Apokolips attacked Earth-2 in the pages of our Earth-2 comic, they were the same forces that are now invading Earth Prime in “Darkseid War.” However, since they exist outside the Multiverse, they require a special form of transportation to get here—boom tubes. If you’ve ever read a comic book with Fourth World characters in it, you’ve almost certainly seen boom tubes. They look something like a wormhole and always appear in comics with a giant BOOOOOOOOOM! sound effect that spans the entire panel. Boom tubes are pretty cool, but what’s most interesting about the worlds of the New Gods are the remarkable characters who live on them.“
