During SnyderCon 2023, Man of Steel director Zack Snyder answered a fan question about Supergirl, which led to him revealing a surprising idea for the DC Extended Universe‘s gods.
Were the DCEU’s gods Kryptonian?
An audience member ended up asking Snyder about how there may have been hints at Supergirl/Kara Zor-El in the DCEU. Visual effects supervisor John ‘D.J.’ Des Jardin followed up by asking Snyder to tell “the real story,” leading the director into a discussion about how the DCEU’s gods may have been Kryptonians.
“It’s this whole thing with the gods and Ares and Zeus and whether or not Zeus was really possibly a Kryptonian,” Snyder revealed. “So that Wonder Woman’s powers … anyway, you can sort of see where that’s going. Because the whole thing of whether or not magic and the gods … you have a mythology built up of, ‘Where do gods come from? What is that about?’ So anyway, we had played around with that quite a bit.”
Des Jardin then added that, within that idea, Ares — played by David Thewlis in 2017’s Wonder Woman — was responsible for the Kryptonian scout ship’s crash landing on Earth ahead of the events of Man of Steel.
“And Ares was the one who caused the scout ship to crash and be in the ice,” Des Jardin stated. “He killed his crew.”
The DCEU began with 2013’s Man of Steel, which portrayed Kryptonians as an advanced alien species. Snyder’s movies often portrayed Superman as being seen as a godly or messianic figure, so the potential connection between Kryptonians and gods lines up with the DCEU’s existing themes.
