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The Zack Snyder DC extended universe grew out of a Superman pitch thrown together during writer's block for a Christopher Nolan Batman movie
David S. Goyer was procrastinating over some third-act issues in The Dark Knight Rises and came up with the initial pitch for Man of Steel as a distraction.
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No matter how experienced a writer is, they still have to learn how to overcome the dreaded Writer’s Block. One way can be to move on to an entirely different project for a while. While working on the third movie in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, David S. Goyer did exactly that – and accidentally came up with the pitch that would become the next Superman movie, Man of Steel, in the meantime.
While writing The Dark Knight Rises, Goyer and the other writers for Nolan’s third Batman movie were running into “third act problems,” Goyer explained during an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “We were just stuck. We were blocked. And Chris [Nolan] said, ‘Okay. Let’s just take a week off and, and see if anything dislodges.’” This is a time-honored technique among writers (though it often looks like procrastination) that can help give you distance from a problem you’re having with a project.
It can also help to distract yourself with something else. For Goyer, that meant musing about Superman instead of Batman. “I was sitting in my home office and nothing was dislodging and I went back and I reread a volume of the first Action Comics and I wrote maybe a three-page outline for a Superman story. And we met with Chris and he said, ‘Did you crack it?’ and I said, ‘No, but I have an idea for a Superman movie.’ And he said ‘Well let’s hear it,’ because we all procrastinate. And he said ‘That’s pretty good.’”
That was all it took for Christopher Nolan to agree to produce the movie. A day later they were meeting with Warner Bros and “It was on,” as Goyer put it. All he had to do now was go back and crack those third-act problems for The Dark Knight Rises and he’d get to write his Superman movie, which would become Man of Steel a few years later.
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