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Marvel's Moon Knight writer has a lost Batman/Superman noir written as a response to the Saw movies
The Mortal Kombat 2 writer was only getting offered low-budget horror, so he spent six months writing a Batman versus Superman script that changed his life.
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Every creative person has that one project that changed the way they approached art, even if it never saw the light of day. Jeremy Slater is currently promoting Mortal Kombat 2, which he wrote – along with the potential sequel we’re hoping gets made. However, before he was working on projects like Fantastic Four and Moon Knight, Slater penned a script that was a Batman vs. Superman treatment inspired by the endless Saw rip-offs he was being asked to write at the time.
14 years ago, Jeremy Slater wasn’t writing Hollywood blockbusters. He was mostly relegated to writing low-budget horror at a time when every studio was trying to capture the Saw magic. Slater was losing hope that he’d even have a career at this point, so he spent six months working on something totally different. “The log line for my Man of Tomorrow script was basically: Batman versus Superman, but it’s The Untouchables in 1940s Chicago," he explained in a recent interview. "It weaved a gangster story in with some superhero trappings. Man of Tomorrow came about because I got my start in low-budget horror, and this was during the torture porn era of Hollywood where everything was a terrible Saw rip-off. So the only opportunities coming my way were horrible movies that I didn’t want to write and no one wanted to see. I knew that I was hanging on to this career by my fingernails, and if I didn’t do something dramatic, I was just going to fall by the roadside.”
Slater dropped everything and spent the next six months working on Man of Tomorrow. “It was a big, R-rated period drama action movie with multiple overlapping timelines. It was just the most ambitious thing I could imagine at the time, and that’s really what broke me out of the low-budget horror box. It put me in the running for jobs like Fantastic Four. So even though it never got made, it is absolutely the script that changed my life and my career in a thousand different ways. If I hadn’t written that script, I know for a fact we would not be sitting here talking right now. I would, once again, be working at a Walmart somewhere.”
Though his Man of Tomorrow script never got made, it got a lot of eyes on it at the time and proved to studios that Slater had the chops to write big-budget films. After that, he was working on movies like Fantastic Four, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and, of course, Mortal Kombat 2. All because of a movie that we’ll likely never see in cinemas.
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