Justice League writer says that it won’t be as dark as Batman v Superman

It's clear from the trailers that BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE won't exactly be a cheery picnic full of sunshine and rainbow barfing unicorns, but the DCEU won't necessarily hang on to that darkness for all of its future installments. Chris Terrio, who re-wrote David Goyer's BATMAN V SUPERMAN script, was brought back to pen the script for JUSTICE LEAGUE – PART ONE and the screenwriter told the Wall Street Journal that he doesn't expect the film to be quite as dark as BATMAN V SUPERMAN will be.

I expect “Justice League” will be tonally not quite as dark as “Batman v Superman.” From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit.

Terrio didn't expect that he would return to the DC Universe again after BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, but he soon realized that he needed to go back and finish telling the rest of the story.

I initially thought I wasn’t the guy to do “Justice League” and went off to work on something else. But the first day I went to the set, I saw Jesse [Eisenberg] in a scene with Holly Hunter and I really did feel like I was watching some strange, great performance in an independent film. At that moment, I thought, “I’m not done with this yet. I want to go back and keep telling the story.” “Batman v Superman” is a bit of an “Empire Strikes Back” or “Two Towers” or any similar middle film in a trilogy. The middle film tends to be the darkest one. I do think from “Man of Steel” through “Justice League,” it is one saga really.

Chris Terrio recently finished off the script for JUSTICE LEAGUE – PART ONE, which will start shooting this April, but he told the WSJ that he won't necessarily be back to write the second installment as he describes his work on BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE and JUSTICE LEAGUE – PART ONE as the "most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life." Terrio doesn't regret a single moment however, as he had the opportunity to delve into many different research topics in his quest to give fans the best he could.

For “Batman v Superman,” I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology. For “Justice League,” I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench. If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies, I would say you were crazy. But I do think fans deserve that. I felt I owed the fan base all of my body and soul for two years because anything less wouldn’t have been appreciating the opportunity I had.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE will hit theaters on March 25, 2016, and JUSTICE LEAGUE – PART ONE will debut on November 17, 2017 and be followed by PART TWO on June 14, 2019.