When Wolfgang Petersen burst onto the scene with his WWII submarine masterpiece “Das Boot,” Hollywood came calling.
Any director who could pin audiences to their seats for two-and-a-half hours with a film that rarely leaves the interior of a U-boat surely had the skills to enthrall viewers with a mainstream blockbuster.
While Petersen proved more than reliable with smashes like “In the Line of Fire,” “Outbreak,” “Air Force One,” and “The Perfect Storm,” he occasionally found himself attached to ambitious projects that, for one reason or another, failed to launch or launched without him at the helm.Petersen, who died on August 12, 2022, at the age of 81, left behind a litany of what-ifs.
He was in the mix on several tantalizing projects that could’ve changed the complexion of superhero and YA filmmaking; there’s an alternate universe in which Petersen revived the DC universe with a Batman and Superman mash-up in the early 2000s.
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