Charles Roven Teases New BATMAN V SUPERMAN Footage and More

Atlas Entertainment President and Charles Roven is a prominent figure in setting up the DC Extended Universe and has also helped director Christopher Nolan create The Dark Knight Trilogy. Needless to say, Mr. Roven knows a thing or two about the superhero genre. Charles sat down with Collider to talk about ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’. Check out bits of their interview down below.

When asked how to keep to keep audiences interested in the superhero genre Roven replied: “I think like any genre, the movies have to be good and you have to keep the audience engaged. One of the things that we’re doing when we’re bringing together the DC Justice League Universe is we’re creating not only stories that work for the individual film but they have some resonance to the other films that we’re doing. And I’m hoping that what’s also gonna keep the interest very keen is we’re telling hopefully compelling stories. I mean, one of the great things about dealing with superheroes in general, at least from our standpoint, is they’re both inspirational and aspirational characters, so you’re hoping that the audience is gonna want to be like some of them but you’re also hoping that the audience can relate to some of them, that if we make their stories compelling and relatable, interesting and emotional, that you’re going to really want to spend more time with them. So you talk about Man of Steel and I felt that Clark’s relationship with both of his fathers was pretty emotional and you can relate, certainly people who lost a loved one can relate, and we all have at some point in our lives lost loved ones. So I think even with Batman v Superman we wanna have characters that touch us, and if we can continue to make films like that, then I think they’re sort of ‘genre proof’”.

While Batman v Superman should be an emotional film, Roven states that the movie will live up to the title ‘Batman v Superman’ saying;“You will definitely understand when you see the movie why we call it Batman v Superman… I’m excited to have people see it. I think it’s really a wonderful film. I think Zack [Snyder]’s done an amazing job, all of the actors who are in it, we were so lucky. Just think about the cast that we have, from Ben [Affleck] to Henry Cavill, to Amy [Adams] to Jesse [Eisenberg] to Jeremy [Irons] to Larry [Lawrence] Fishburne. Just amazing, and they all really bring it. Really great. Very happy.”

Roven says that there is still a lot of visual effects that need to be finished, but also said to expect more footage to be released before the end of the year: “Honestly, you’re going be seeing something very soon… I don’t know how you define soon but certainly before the end of the year, how about that?” Sounds good to me!

When Collider raised the question of Batman v Superman being “to crowded” Roven replied:“I don’t think that’s an issue for this film at all. I really don’t… I think that the film is called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, so there’s a reason it’s called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and not Dawn of Justice: Batman v Superman. So you’re gonna invest mostly in Batman v Superman and I think that you’ll find other characters in there that you hopefully will want to see more of.”

Batman v Superman will have a great balance between the characters. Most of the credit will go to David S. Goyer and Oscar winner Chris Terrio.

“First of all, Chris Terrio is a fantastic writer, you said it earlier, he won the Oscar for Argo. David Goyer is a fantastic writer, and I think that we were very fortunate that even though it wasn’t a collaboration it was a very good blending of the two guys’ talents.”

Lastly Charles Roven was asked how will they keep their grounded approach with a character like Wonder Woman set to appear in ‘Batman v Superman’: “Let’s start with what we’re doing with Man of Steel, because Chris’ Dark Knight trilogy was actually different in the sense that the Dark Knight trilogy had no superheroes in it, none whatsoever. It had a man who made himself both mentally and physically into the best a man could be, and the villains in that were also humans who whether they were aberrated or not were also heightened in terms of their ability to accomplish their goals through their own methods. Very real, very grounded, but of this Earth.

On Man of Steel, we also tried to make things feel as real as possible, but we took you to Krypton. We started on Krypton, we gave you Krypton technology and Krypton science and we tried to do it in a way that if there was this planet, what was their culture, what was their language, what were they thinking about, what was their science, what was their technology. And we did try to make that real but we were also taking you into an alien world, and I think we’ve tried to follow that, so make it feel grounded but also otherworldly. So whatever we do with any of these characters we’re gonna want them to be grounded, we’re gonna want the science to feel real whether it’s of this world or not of this world.”

Roven continued: “We tried [to make it all feel real] when we brought it here, when Zod came here, we wanted to make sure that we followed that. We actually talked about what would that technology translate to here. And I think you’ll see in Batman v Superman we stayed true to that, we were attempting to stay true to that, how are things affecting Superman here, Batman is still human, he’s not Meta, he’s just a human, Wonder Woman is Meta, if you will, although some might think that she’s a God.”

Just knowing that another trailer is on the way gets us even more excited for Batman v Superman! For the full interview with Charles Roven click here. For more ‘Batman v Superman’ news stay tuned.

Batman v Superman; Dawn of Justice hits theaters March 25th, 2016.