#Man of Steel Was Born from Writer’s Block on The Dark Knight Rises Set

For comic book movies, the late 2000s were something of a pivotal point for the biggest names in the genre, with the birth of the MCU, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel all changing the landscape of the big superhero blockbuster for a generation to come. While Marvel set out to create their interconnected universe of films from the start, Nolan’s Dark Knight movies essentially kick-started a DC universe of sorts, and in a new interview with screenwriter David S Goyer, it would appear that Man of Steel came about mainly thanks to a bout of writers block while completing work on The Dark Knight Rises.

Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Goyer spoke about his time working on Man of Steel and relayed the story of how he and Nolan hit a wall on the Batman movie, which saw them move on to something else – Superman.

“When Chris and I were beating out The Dark Knight Rises, we ran into some issues in the middle of the film. It was a number of things: How Bruce was going to defeat Bane, how he was going to escape the Pit and the switch reveal – that the child was actually Talia. Chris and I just hit a wall, and Chris suggested we take a break for a week and put our pencils down. It’s counterintuitive, because you think you have to keep at it. But often when you have writer’s block, it’s best to just walk away, do something completely different and just hope that your subconscious will come to the rescue.”

“What happened during that week [off] is I ended up rereading the first few years of Action Comics and writing down a two-pager for a Superman movie. So when we came back, Chris said, ‘Well, have any ideas?’ And I said, ‘I’ve got this Superman movie that has nothing to do with The Dark Knight Rises.’ That’s how Man of Steel happened. We ended up pitching it to Warner Bros. and getting that going.”

When you consider Man of Steel alongside Batman Begins, there are a lot of similarities. While David S. Goyer is happy to believe that he was led to the Superman movie as a way of clearing his mind of the puzzle of Batman’s finale, the non-linear story of Man of Steel, which patchworks together the tale of his past with the present, which is more or less the way Batman Begins kicked off Christian Bale’s stint in the cowl.

Many fans of those movies have often pointed out feeling as though there was a connection between the two DC franchises, and that it was almost as if there something written into the very fabric of the movies that the characters were heading for a meeting on screen. If only that had come to be, there could perhaps have been less of a jarring and incoherent few years in the DC world that we endured until they began to pull the strings a little tighter and bring back some kind of true connection between their Justice League characters. This story originated from an interview at The Hollywood Reporter.