When Alan Ritchson talked himself out of the Batman job on the Reacher panel stage at San Diego Comic-Con in July, he left a door propped open behind him. He’d had a lot of conversations with DC, he said, because both sides wanted to work together, and he wasn’t going to lead anyone on about which character those conversations actually involved. He didn’t name it, but a month later, someone else did.
The guessing in between has been enthusiastic and largely unfounded, cycling through Wildcat, Orion, Captain Atom, and Hawkman, all of them defensible for an actor who has already played Aquaman on Smallville and Hank Hall on Titans. Ritchson had narrowed the field himself back in November, telling ScreenRant he wanted “somebody a little messier” than a clean-cut protagonist, which took half the DC Universe roster off the table and pointed to the villain side.
Superman Saga News has now relayed a claim from Jeff Sneider’s The InSneider that the role in question sat inside DC Studios’ untitled Bane and Deathstroke movie, and that talks about Ritchson playing Slade Wilson have since ended. The reveal and the obituary arrive in the same breath, which is a fairly DCU way to find out about any of this.
That film has been circling development since September 2024, when the trades reported DC Studios had hired Matthew Orton to write it. It was reported in May that Greg Mottola had become the frontrunner to direct, having already helmed episodes of Peacemaker Season 2, though those reports carefully noted that no script had come in, no contracts had been signed, and other names were still in the mix. It would be the character’s first proper turn on the big screen; Joe Manganiello’s version got a post-credits cameo in Justice League, and then a Ben Affleck movie that never happened, and Esai Morales played him on Titans, opposite, as it happens, Ritchson.
Ritchson would have been an obvious fit. Deathstroke is a mercenary built on physicality rather than menace, and the thing Reacher has proved across four seasons is that Ritchson can make sheer size do the work of a plot device. Talks ending on a project this unformed isn’t much of a scandal, though. James Gunn and Peter Safran have made it clear that they won’t greenlight anything until they’re satisfied with a complete screenplay, and the DCU’s development slate has a long history of stalling, from a Booster Gold series to everything that fell away in the franchise reboot.
There’s also the small matter of his diary. Reacher Season 4 landed on Prime Video this month, with Season 5 already shooting; Motor City and War Machine are both in play, and reporting around Comic-Con put him booked through 2028. Whichever door DC eventually holds open, he may not be free to walk through it before someone else takes the mask.
- Birthdate
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November 28, 1982
- Birthplace
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Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
