#1 Age Matters

 

Deathstroke isn’t typically old for the sake of it. The reason he has silver hair in New 52 and Rebirth is because it best displays the fact that he’s seasoned and experienced. At just 39, however, Joe Manganiello is actually younger than Ben Affleck, and we’ll have to wait and see if the movie tries to age up Manganiello as a result.

My initial instinct is to worry about this, because it makes little sense to present a fully realized Deathstroke while Batman has been in business for 20 years. This probably means that if Deathstroke has any connection whatsoever to Nightwing in the DCEU (which he should, at least eventually), it will have to be a recent or ongoing conflict. And that gives me hope because it could be why Manganiello was chosen in the first place. Warner Bros. hopefully realizes that audiences have already seen Dick Grayson more than enough times as Robin, and he’s too old in this continuity to be the Boy Wonder, anyway.

But if they presented Slade Wilson as someone who is not quite as old as he would be in the comics at this point, there’s room to explore his rivalry with Nightwing and/or the Teen Titans sometime in the future. One can hope, at least.

Wrapping Up

 

Most of us can agree that New 52 Deathstroke was far from perfect and definitely flawed for the most part. It abandoned what made the original conceit of the character so engaging, halting the evolution of Slade Wilson in favor of cheesy, bloody action peril and a disgruntled old man who can’t get over his past traumas.

At the same time, though, the New 52 at least presented some ideal theories for where the character can go next, as seen in the promising (so far) Rebirth series. His reputation is everything, sometimes more important than family. His real weakness is emotion, not intellect or physicality, which means he constantly battles the “liabilities” of people who get too close. There are plenty of ways for the DCEU to adapt these ideas into a worthwhile Batman story, where he’s positioned as an exceptional antagonist.