The reasons behind their exclusions may vary, but here's a look at some DCEU characters who
all share a common thread: disappearing from a superhero mega-franchise without a trace.
These are the characters who disappeared without explanation.
Will Smith's Floyd Lawton, also known as Deadshot,
is introduced in Suicide Squad as a master marksman who never misses his target.
He's also shown to be a devoted father to his daughter, Zoe. After being incarcerated, Deadshot
is recruited as a member of the government-run Suicide Squad team. From there, he helps defeat
the film's nefarious villain Enchantress, before being put back in his prison cell.
Originally, this was to be just the start of Deadshot's journey in the DCEU.
Five months before Suicide Squad premiered, Variety even reported that Smith was reprising
his role as Deadshot in a sequel to the movie. By the end of that year,
various reports noted that a spinoff movie about Deadshot was in development. In 2018, Smith said:
"They've been talking about it. So if a good idea comes around,
we've been having meetings. But I would love to. I love Deadshot."
In the years since, however, there's been little word about Deadshot having any
further presence in the DCEU. Reflecting his diminished status in this franchise,
Deadshot wasn't even referenced in Harley Quinn's solo movie, Birds of Prey.
However, there's still hope for the character's return. According to Variety, after initial
attempts to recast the role, Deadshot was written out of the upcoming movie The Suicide Squad.
But this isn't quite as bad as it sounds: According to sources,
the decision was made in order to allow Smith the chance to reprise his role in the future.
For a good while, it appeared that Deathstroke was poised to be a major fixture in the DCEU.
Joe Manganiello was cast in the role in September 2016, intended to be the villain of Ben Affleck's
The Batman. A year later, in October 2017, Gareth Evans was in talks to write and direct
a solo Deathstroke movie starring Manganiello, too. All of these developments occurred before
Deathstroke made his first DCEU appearance in a post-credits scene for Justice League,
which teased him teaming up with Lex Luthor to found the Legion of Doom.
Unfortunately, none of these plans for Deathstroke ever came to fruition. First, Affleck's version
of The Batman fell apart. Matt Reeves took over the project and put together a new cast, which
didn't include Manganiello. Additionally, the Deathstroke solo movie never got off the ground.
In April 2020, Evans described his proposed Deathstroke movie to Yahoo! Movies UK as:
"A lean story, that would be kind of an origin of that character. Something that felt like it
could be 100 minutes or 110 minutes long, max — not to go over the two hour period with it."
Plans for another Justice League movie also never came to fruition,
leading to no follow-up on that Deathstroke post-credits scene. Currently, there are
no plans to have Deathstroke show up in any future DCEU movies. In October 2019,
Manganiello referenced his troubled experiences with Deathstroke by telling Comic Book Resources:
"Someday I'll write a book about it, but that time is... yeah."
Among the military personnel fixated on Superman in Man of Steel was General Calvin Swanwick.
Played by Harry Lennix, Swanwick proved a useful ally to Superman in the fight against General Zod.
In his second appearance in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,
the character had gone from being a military general to United States Secretary of Defense.
Lennix's prominence in the franchise even extended off the screen.
At the 2013 San Diego International Comic-Con, Zack Snyder had Lennix read
a passage from The Dark Knight Returns as a way of announcing that the follow-up to Man of Steel
would pit Batman against Superman. Snyder also planned to have Swanwick become a superhero
himself in Justice League. Per the storyboards that Zack Snyder shared on his Vero account,
Swanwick was to eventually be revealed as the cosmic being Martian Manhunter.
These plans, however, never came to pass. After Snyder was taken off Justice League,
Swanwick was left out of the film's theatrical cut. Swanwick hasn't been seen since Batman v.
Superman and no future DCEU movies have announced plans to bring the character back.
In 2013's Man of Steel, Laurence Fishburne appeared as the most
recent cinematic incarnation of the Daily Planet chief Perry White.
For his take on the character, Fishburne told ComicBook.com that
"Essentially, I used my model, my inspiration really is the late Ed Bradley,
who was a CBS correspondent on 60 Minutes for many years."
Fishburne reprised the role in the second entry in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Since that 2016 feature, though, Fishburne's Perry White has been absent from the DCEU.
This is partially due to scheduling conflicts on the part of Fishburne. When asked to reprise the
White role in Justice League, Fishburne declined the offer. He later told The Los Angeles Times:
"They asked me to come for a day, but I couldn't work it out, schedule-wise.
And really, what do you need the newspaperman in Justice League for?"
Fishburne subsequently noted that he wasn't sure about his future in the DCEU.
In 2018, he revealed to Den of Geek:
"I don't think I'm still on call. I was unfortunately unable to go do some work
on what turned out to be the Justice League movie. I don't know that I need to go back
or if they'll have me back or not, but I was grateful to have been a part of it."
Though a new Superman adventure could see the character returning, for now,
the DCEU's Perry White appears to have become yesterday's news.
Killer Croc made his live-action movie debut in Suicide Squad, in which he was portrayed
by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. A member of the titular group of supervillains, Croc managed
to survive the events of Suicide Squad and ended the film with both a reduced prison sentence and
access to BET in his jail cell. However, unlike some of his fellow Suicide Squad characters,
Killer Croc will not be returning for the next installment in the franchise. But this
development seems to suit Akinnuoye-Agbaje just fine. He told Yahoo! Movies UK:
"I don't think I need to [do it again], to be honest.
I did it, I enjoyed it, it bought me a Bentley and I will keep moving on."
Killer Croc being alive at the end of Suicide Squad means the door is still open for his return,
however, should any subsequent DCEU movies want to further explore the character.
For now, though, neither the DCEU nor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is in
a rush to revisit the scaliest member of the Suicide Squad.
"This is Katana. She's got my back. She could cut all you in
half with one sword stroke, just like mowing the lawn."
Ok, yeah, not the greatest intro in the world.
But Katana showed some pretty extraordinary superpowers in Suicide Squad,
especially when compared to the more grounded skills of some of her teammates.
Even with those abilities, though, Katana ended up having a pretty small role in the movie.
This is primarily due to a number of her scenes ending up on the cutting room floor, including
a sequence during which she became possessed by Enchantress and attacked the other Suicide Squad
members. Sadly, her reduced presence in Suicide Squad ended up mirroring her subsequent role in
the entire DCEU franchise. Since her debut, Katana has been absent from all other DCEU properties,
including her team's follow-up movie. This is despite actress Karen Fukuhara having a clear
vision of where she wanted to take the character in future movies. As she once told ComicBook.com:
"I'd like to explore where she's from,
what kind of training she comes from — if she gets a stand-alone movie that would be awesome!
There's so much story from the point of her husband's death to her story leading
up to Suicide Squad — that's something that I'd love to show on the screen."
Unfortunately, though she may have Rick Flagg's back,
the DCEU doesn't have any plans to bring Katana back just yet.
There are many superheroes in the DCEU, but none have the technological prowess of Cyborg.
He made his first full-fledged appearance as part of the titular superhero team in Justice
League after being introduced to audiences via a cameo in Batman v. Superman. Originally,
the DCEU had big plans for Cyborg which included the character co-starring in an
early version of the Flash movie. From there, Cyborg was supposed to get his own solo movie,
entitled Cyborg, which was set for an April 3rd 2020 release.
"Booyah."
However, those ambitions ultimately went unfulfilled. Since Justice League in 2017,
Cyborg has made no further appearances in the DCEU. Ray Fisher has said the lack
of movement for the solo Cyborg movie is simply due to money. He told CinemaBlend:
"There's a ton of people making those kinds of decisions behind the scenes.
And it would be a very, very costly movie to make because it is so CGI heavy with Cyborg.
Because I'm the only member of the League that's not in a practical costume.
You're going to be looking at $200 million just to make it."
Despite the character's absence from the DCEU,
Fisher hasn't given up hope on playing Cyborg again.
Fisher commented on the prospect of reprising the role in a Twitch livestream by saying:
"Nothing's off the table [...] Knock on wood."
With no future appearances on the horizon, though,
the most tech-savvy DCEU hero has, for now, been put in sleep mode.
Prior to the release of Suicide Squad, theories abounded about
who Ike Barinholtz was playing in the film. Dr. Hugo Strange was a particularly popular guess.
But if you're struggling to remember if Barinholtz was even in Suicide Squad,
well, it's because he wasn't playing an famous comic book character at all.
In reality, Barinholtz ended up playing a totally original character by the name of Hunter Griggs.
Griggs was a sadistic prison guard at Belle Reeve tasked with guarding the supervillains
that would make up the Suicide Squad team. In the earliest scenes of the film, he's shown
perpetrating particularly nasty acts of abuse against Deadshot and Harley Quinn. Eventually,
Griggs is taken captive by the Joker, but at this point he pretty much vanishes from the movie.
"You're so screwed."
"What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Harley, what do you mean by that?"
The audience is never shown Griggs' fate, and the DCEU is apparently in no hurry to
clarify Harley's statement. Since Suicide Squad, Griggs has failed to appear in any
other DCEU properties and he isn't a part of the cast of The Suicide Squad. Though
pre-release speculation ran rampant over who Hunter Griggs was, it turns out the character
wasn't all that important to Suicide Squad — or, for that matter, the DCEU at large.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice was all about showdowns between superheroes. But it
still had room for a supervillain. That adversary was Superman foe Lex Luthor, here portrayed
by Jesse Eisenberg. The man who orchestrated the titular duel between Batman and Superman,
Luthor is also responsible for creating Doomsday, the creature that eventually kills Superman.
By the end of Batman v. Superman, Luthor has been sent to prison, had his head shaved, and delivered
some vague warnings to Batman indicating that he's aware of an impending attack by Darkseid.
Luthor's final moments in Batman v. Superman set up plenty of different directions the character
could go down in future DCEU movies. However, despite those cliffhangers, the DCEU version
of Luthor and his potential connections to Darkseid have been almost totally ignored:
He's only appeared once since Batman v. Superman, in a Justice League post-credits scene.
"To put it plainly, shouldn't we have a league of our own?"
In the years since Justice League, no other DCEU movies have even referenced this particular
supervillain. And with no upcoming DCEU movies planning to end the character's absence,
even Eisenberg is doubtful he'll ever return to the role of Lex Luthor. As he told MovieWeb:
"I probably won't do another. I don't know,
if they're making another one, where I would be in it."
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