We all remember the hype that surrounded Ben Affleck’s The Batman. For over a year, fans were thrilled at the prospect of the award-winning filmmaker heading to the DC extended universe. The flames of excitement were further fanned by Affleck himself when he released a test video of the fan favorite character, Deathstroke.

It wasn’t long until actor Joe Manganiello was then attached to portray the Terminator himself, Slade Wilson, but audiences would be in for quite the disappointment when it turned out that Affleck would not be directing the film, and this put Deathstroke’s involvement in limbo as well. Speaking with Chris Hardwick on his ID10T podcast, Manganiello opened up about all the work that went into prepping this film, and how it led to discussions with Gareth Evans to direct a standalone Deathstroke film.

“This is a real opportunity to figure out who this guy is on the inside. Like what he’s battling with…There are villains who are the people who are opposing them but from the inside this is a person who is struggling with all types of things. I think it’s really interesting to tell that kind of a story and tell the truth emotionally of a story like that when you’re talking about a man who lost an eye, was betrayed, lost a son. These different types of aspects.

Then you couple that with real world military training. Then I started training at like a Ninjutsu dojo and started learning sword fighting. Started learning and understanding where those techniques come from. All the sudden this thing starts writing itself.

What I love doing is in an instance like that I’m able to, at the ground level, I’m able to go back and pitch all of my work. So I’m pitching them: “This is where I think he comes from. This is where I think he’s going. This is the military background. These are some articles that I pulled for you. I also interviewed these people over here.”

…

Somewhere along that way I know that it was announced where the studio… there was talks with Gareth Evans and talks about an origin movie. I’m not giving news. I spent six months prior to all of those phone calls writing a backstory that was turned into sixteen pages which got turned into a treatment which then led to my Skype call with Gareth.”

Though while The Batman is still up in the air, Deathstroke still made his big screen debut in Justice League. Now that it’s out in the open that Manganiello put in all this work, perhaps that will help to further conversations with Evans, as a standalone film with Manganiello in the lead would be great to see.

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SOURCE: ID10T, Reddit