Though Christopher Nolan executive produced Batman v. Superman, he didn’t have much involvement in the film and took a backseat after being highly active as a producer on Man of Steel. But the Dark Knight director did have some input on the newest Batman movie, including one of the film’s most crucial scenes.

MAJOR spoilers for Batman v. Superman ahead

Batman v. Superman director Zack Snyder spoke to Collider and revealed that as they were having conversations about whether or not to kill off Superman at the end of the film, it was actually Nolan himself who gave them the approval to go for it.

It was pretty early, and [Christopher] Nolan and I had long conversation about it, a really great, sort of philosophical conversation about it. He was really cool because he played an amazing devil’s advocate about why not to do it, and then in the end was like, ‘No you’re right, it’s better to do it.’

So, what was Snyder’s reasoning for killing off Superman that convinced Christopher Nolan to sign off on it?

One of the big things I wanted to make sure of was that as we went into Justice League, Bruce Wayne was the one who was gathering the Justice League. I thought it was really important to have Bruce Wayne be the samurai who goes and finds the other samurai, that to me was important. And with Superman around it’s kinda hard, because Superman’s Superman so it’s kinda hard for Bruce to be like, ‘Yeah I wanna put a Justice League together’. It’s like, ‘Okay, but maybe Superman should be doing that.

Snyder says an early version of the script instead had it where Superman was frozen and shot into space, which may have been a little bit too much Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. He also says that when he told the studio of his plans, they were initially reluctant, but that he told them he would subtitle the film Dawn of Justice to hint to people that Superman wasn’t going to stay dead for long.

It will be interesting to see, going forward, what involvement, if any, Christopher Nolan has with the future of the DC Cinematic Universe. Considering he’s about to begin filming on Dunkirk, while Snyder is filming Justice League, we’d guess not much involvement at all.

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