10 DC Characters Willem Dafoe Could Play in Justice League

Edited by Robert Beach 

We are a year and a few months away from WB/DC’s latest answer to the Avengers: 2017’s Justice League movie. Your level of excitement for that fact may vary based on whether or not you saw the slow-motion train wreck that was Batman v. Superman. Yes, in the wake of WB’s blockbuster debacle, attitudes seem to be shifting around the second biggest superhero team-up ever attempted as Justice League is looking less and less like an assemblage of Earth’s greatest heroes and simply another chance for Zack Snyder and the boneheads at WB and DC entertainment to get everything wrong.

It’s hard to argue against that particular philosophy given we’ve seen this guy’s god awful handiwork twice in a row now, but a year is still a long time with plenty of chances for things to improve.  Case in point, Justice League has now officially cast Oscar-winner Willem Dafoe in a mystery role. Dafoe has stated his role’s a hero, but anything is possible this early on. With that in mind, let’s make some guesses as to who the former Green Goblin might be playing. 

Static Thoughts - DCAU Crossovers

So, this past Wednesday CW’s Arrow featured a one-off crossover with the cancelled Matt Ryan Constantine show in an episode called Haunted.  The episode was decent enough with most of the fun coming from just how gung-ho Matt Ryan was to both play John Constantine again and get to do all kinds of wizard shenanigans that he never got to sink his teeth into enough on his own show.  However, the episode got me thinking about the idea of crossovers in general, with a specific lens for the superhero genre.  Crossovers in superhero stories are as old as the genre itself mainly because “superhero” as a genre is so vague and open that it tends to absorb a ton of broader genres such as fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and horror into it.  At the same time, crossovers have always been a great way for superhero TV to expand its world and test more obscure and bizarre characters who might not have found an audience otherwise.  The best example of this is from the DC Animated Universe that started with Batman: The Animated Series and concluded with the massive Justice League Unlimited, which included almost every DC hero imaginable (even Aztek got in there.)  I’m ranking the individual crossovers from the Batman and Superman shows. 

Is the Justice Society coming to CW?

As the summer begins to wind down all the big networks have started ramping up for the fall premieres.  By this I of course mean that the small handful of networks to feature comic book adaptations or genre shows are prepping for the fall while everyone else continues to push their summer blockbuster shows like Tyrant, Under the Dome, or The Humans.  Among the ramp up to the autumn of genre shows has been a ton of character reveals coming out of CW for their shared universe of superhero shows, which includes The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow.  There have been a bunch of reveals of ultimately obscure characters like Atom Smasher, Mr. Terrific, Hawkman, Baron Blitzkrieg, Vandal Savage, and Jay Garrick, to appear in the coming seasons.  Individually these reveals wouldn’t really matter but taken as a whole they actually build up to a pretty startling picture, especially given statements by producers about Flash season 2’s emphasis on parallel realities and Legends of Tomorrow’s bent towards time travel.  The big question I’ve ended up asking myself is…is CW planning to introduce the Justice Society of America?