You may recall a few years back, when rumors sprouted up that Dwayne Johnson was being courted to star in Lobo, a film about the DC anti-hero. The rumors intensified when Johnson’s Journey 2 director, Brad Peyton, signed on to helm the project. But somewhere along the way, it became clear that Johnson’s dealings were more of an open-ended “choose what you want to do” thing, and that Lobo was necessarily a priority for Warner Bros/DC. Ultimately, Johnson chose to play Black Adam in Shazam!, and Lobo ended up falling completely off the DC slate. 

Now Peyton, who still ended up working with Johnson again on the upcoming San Andreas, is opening up a bit about what he thinks is happening with Lobo. In a chat with ComingSoon, the director had this to say:

“I think what’s happening with DC is that they have prioritized what they need to make first in order to kind of lay the foundations for the DC Universe. This is what I believeis happening just from what they’ve been taking about. They’re talking about ‘Justice League,’ ‘Batman v Superman,’ and going into ‘Flash,’ ‘Wonder Woman,’ and ‘Aquaman.’ Those are kind of the pillars of that universe.”

While it sounds like he’s merely speculating, what he’s saying does make sense. He then continued to elaborate on what he thinks their plan is, and draws a comparison between DC and Marvel’s game plans:

“It’s one of those things where, creatively, you and I get it, but there’s a lot of people that don’t quite get that. It’s a real uphill battle to talk people into spending a lot of money to do things correctly… I was really happy with the script, [though]. I talked with Dwayne about it. Joel Silver and I had a really amazing meeting about it. I did a rewrite of the script and was really, really excited for it. In their estimation, though, he wasn’t one of those main guys… That’s fair enough. I think that, to do any kind of comic book universe correctly, you do need to establish, ‘Here’s the tone. Here’s the main people.’ Then we can grow offshoots from there. With Marvel, they’re now doing smaller characters like ‘Ant-Man’ and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ They obviously had to start, though, with their big guns and set up ‘The Avengers.’ I kind of feel like that’s where DC is now. They’re setting that team up.”

Peyton remains hopeful that Lobo will get made at some point, still feeling very high on the material they had started putting together.

“I think there’s going to be a really amazing time for ‘Lobo’ and I think people are going to realize, certainly once they revisit it, what they’re sitting on. But you never know. I’m really happy with the project and where we got it and fingers crossed it comes to fruition at some point.”

Something else that could help Lobo‘s chances of seeing the light of day is next year’s Deadpool. Twentieth Century Fox’s big screen take on Marvel’s antihero mercenary, starring Ryan Reynolds, could make Lobo seem awfully appealing if it’s a hit. 

What do you think? Would Lobo get your money? And who would you want to play him, now that Johnson is Black Adam?

SOURCE: SuperHeroHype