And that’s one of biggest failures of the DCEU, right there. Especially as compared to the success of the MCU.
In the MCU, the arc of Phase 1 gave us Fury, Coulson, the Tesseract, Loki: elements that drew together all the films and made Avengers make sense, gave Avengers some context and purpose and some emotional stakes. Every character in Avengers had been previously established and had a meaningful emotional arc to bring them there.
The release-date time span from MoS to JL was four months longer than IM1 to Avengers. DC had more time to build their story, and botched it.
In the DCEU, there was no sensible character development leading to JL, no threads to draw the films and propel them to the capstone. Half the heroes were introduced for the first time in JL, because they stuck the zany unconnected movie (Suicide Squad) before the first-phase capstone (unlike GotG which came out after Avengers). There was no build up toward the threat, no plot development to make the villain in JL believable. The villain was an afterthought, with no connection to any of the prior films, no reason to act as he was acting, no genuine malevolence or well-established motivation, and so hidden under really really bad CGI that he was in no way menacing. He is absurd.
Coulson died and it was a brutal gut punch that brought the team together. Justice League slaughtered dozens of Amazons and Atlaneans with zero impact on the audience or anybody in the story.
And Aquaman? The JL boss fight involves Aquaman and it’s nowhere near water. So, yeah, I have no confidence that this studio has any clue about what to do with that character.
