When we last checked in with the long-gestating Justice League Dark film, director Doug Liman had walked away from it to go make sci-fi actioner Chaos Walking. At the time, Warner Bros. had said it hoped to name a replacement director “shortly,” which we now know means “longer than three months, because here we are at the end of summer and there’s still no one helming this thing.” But if nothing else, at least the studio is still trying to make the script better: Deadline reports writer-director Gerard Johnstone has been tapped to do a polish on the screenplay for the superhero team-up film.
Justice League Dark features protagonists from the more morally ambiguous side of the DC universe—think Swamp Thing, Constantine, Zatanna—so the studio seems to have chosen someone who enjoys playing around with darker subject matter. Johnstone’s Housebound was an entertaining New Zealand-set horror-comedy (more of the latter than the former, but a decent mix of both), and his take on the DC universe obviously impressed the people tasked with getting this damn film back on track. Now, if only Universal hadn’t stolen the “Dark Universe” name that DC already used for Justice League Dark, this project might seem a bit more likely to actually happen sometime in the next year or so.