Snyder isn’t the problem - his movies were re-edited by idiots.
Marvel just got enormously lucky by getting Robert Downey for Tony Stark - he then set the tone for everything else.
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Thor gets a free pass. Chops a guys head off, kills probably thousands in war in NY & across the nine realms. Don’t even bring up Punisher and Deadpool.
DC just needs to learn how to kill people. Other than Wonder Woman. She kills well.
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It’s as if the people in charge of making these stories are unfamiliar with the concept of “story.”
I recommend a deep reading of the “Poetics.”
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One more thing:
I re-watched the first Iron Man the other day.
The group that kidnaps Tony Stark in the beginning?
It’s the Ten Rings.
That, my friend, is long range plotting.
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Is there a reason Zack Snyder’s name is misspelled all the way through this article?
Also, I agree with all of this. Snyder is a terrible, unimaginative, ‘more is more’ hack director that has made some impressively boring films.
Just as I imagine any animators’ hearts fall when they watch 90% of Pixar movies, I imagine DC’s do when they watch 90% of MCU content, simply for the blend of humour, narrative, character and relative emotional range.
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Green Lit or Green Shit?
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And that really confused me at first, until I realized the new project was literally nothing but a Tom Cruise vehicle (i.e. his $cientology handlers insisting yet again on contracts where his character is the perfect $cientologist, flawless and boring.) All they had to do is draw on some nostalgia, update some special effects, and tell a good story, and they’d be able to tap into the old horror films’ legacy goodwill. Just state that the old 30s and 40s, even the schlocky 50s stuff is cannon, actually happened, and the old films were attempts to cover it all up. Done. Heck, find a couple of Abbott and Constello expys and use them as a common element to bind the new movies together; not someone who inherently limits your audience by all the baggage he brings with him, and makes every movie he’s in all about him, instead of the story.
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It didn’t & that’s the real irony; DC animated series are typically very good, whereas the live action films are usually terrible.
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I just boggles my mind that DC seems to just fall flat on its face most of the time story wise.
I am a huge Green Lantern Fan. There are dozens of good stories from the books you could have used. Heck, just adapt Emerald Dawn. Instead the came up with a convoluted mess where you don’t even LIKE Hal Jordan. 
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Aside of telling stories for The Avenger’s, I don’t think it really hurts that they’ve had The Snap and have now been introduced to the multiverse. There’s lots of fun stories that can be told within that structure, there’s not really a need to keep escalating the threat level. In fact, there’s even merit in deescalating. The latest Spider-Man movie very much results in that sort of situation and I could see The Avenger’s going a similar route, considering they’re going to be a re-configured team when they next appear. There’s also any number of interesting side stories that can be told and still as of yet introduced characters to introduce.
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that previs video is cool, especially where they use it to extract camera movements. that said, animatics and story boards are old hat. and you could plot a universe with nothing more than an outline on paper. you just have to stick to it
( spending millions to build previs tho might help a studio stick to a plan. nothing says “easy” like a handwritten pieces of paper, even if both products can take months or years to figure out )
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Unpopular opinion: I quite liked the Snyder trilogy. I had no interest whatsoever in any of the DC movies, recoiling at even the title of batman vs Superman…
Then the four hour version of justice league came out and I heard enough positives to pique my interest. Not expecting much I really enjoyed it. It’s bonkers, not feasible to watch in one sitting, but the good bits are great. That made me watch the other two in reverse order, the longer versions, and annoying bits aside, I enjoyed those too.
Anyway, as I said, unpopular opinion, but there you have it.
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DC/WB and Universal (with their 2 failed attempts to start a new Monsters shared universe) want to duplicate the success of Marvel Studios, but for some unfathomable reason, they have been unwilling to do what Marvel did. And what did they do? First of all, they started their own studio, reasoning that no existing studio would “get” their IP better than they did. Then they put somebody in charge of it (Kevin Feige), and let him really be in charge. That’s why every film and tv series and web short has been consistent and on point. The directors they hire are not given a whole lot of creative freedom to do what they want. They have to stay in the box. They’re given a pretty big box, but it’s still a box. That’s probably why Whedon bailed after two films, and it’s definitely why Ed Norton bailed after one (he wasn’t the director, but he wanted more say in the direction of the film). It’s the same reason the Star Wars sequel trilogy failed. No one was in charge of the overall project. I think the other thing Marvel has done well is mine the comics for stories. They change them, obviously, but they mostly aren’t inventing entirely new stories and plots, and they’ve been willing to mine pretty deep and take risks. How many people had heard of Guardians of the Galaxy before that movie was announced? I hadn’t. And I didn’t see how that was possibly going to work, but it did.
DC has just as deep a vault of characters and stories as Marvel, but they keep wanting to make up new stories using those characters. Sometimes it works (Joker), but sometimes it doesn’t (Whedon’s Justice League). And, of course, no one is in charge of ensuring a cohesive, consistent universe. It’s all just a jumbled mess, both in plot and in tone.
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Added irony (for me, at least) is that I’ve always found the Marvel animated shows unwatchable. Boring animation styles and humorless writing. Similar to how someone here said casting Downy Jr as Iron Man set a great tone, BTAS was pure gold and paved the way for everything that followed.
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Agreed!
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When WB started making non-DCEU movies (e.g. Joker) that didn’t fit the “cinematic universe,” that was a pretty definitive sign they giving up on trying to go the Marvel route. And just as well, as if they were going the Marvel route, some of their better-received movies wouldn’t have ever been made. Doing what Marvel’s been doing means hugely restricting the creative freedom of the filmmakers - even more than is already true by working with existing properties on movies of this scale.
Yeah, that was always dumb. Everyone’s so eager to have “cinematic universes” (i.e. a franchise of connected sequels that all build off the PR of the others), they’re all trying to make square pegs fit into Marvel-shaped holes. Which doesn’t work, obviously. But it’s especially dumb when you’re trying to make horror movies into a superhero franchise.
I suppose it’s only a matter of time - they have the whole “Batman 66” comic book series, so an eventual adaptation seems inevitable. They’ve got a “Batman 89” series as well, and that’s already resulted in Keaton returning to the part for tv/movies.
Also, after destroying the Avengers, which was the lynchpin of the movie franchise. There’s nothing holding it all together now. After Endgame, they needed to build up a new core element, but instead did a prequel and “Eternals,” that wasn’t connected to anything. (Using that to introduce two new characters unconnected to anything going on in that movie was weird, too.) Adding in multiverse shenanigans is just going to dilute things further.
For DC, it absolutely already has been - but now they’re moving away from that. All their shows seem to have run their course and are winding down (or already over). WB never seemed to quite realize the importance of them, though - they always forced the shows to take a backseat role to the movies. Every time they did a movie, any relevant characters introduced in the shows had to disappear (or never appear, if they planned - and then ultimately failed - to make a movie with the character). E.g. they introduced the “suicide squad” and then had to immediately drop it as the movie got the greenlight. The popular “Flash” series has apparently been on the edge of cancellation, saved only by the delays in making the movie. I guess they have a few new streaming shows in production, but none of it is nearly as ambitious as the shows they’re losing (nor as integrated with each other).
Marvel’s been somewhat the same - the tv shows were mostly not connected to the MCU, so they’re all gone, leaving Disney to make a few streaming miniseries that tie into the films.
When Thor kills people, it’s usually played for laughs, rather than being some realistic, gritty, sadistic, Snyder-esque nonsense, E.g.:
Marvel throws a lot of small references in the movies - they’re chock full of significant character names and oblique references; most of them get subsequently ignored. They do plan things out far in advance, but probably not quite that far. They sprinkle elements in to add texture and that they could make use of later, if they want, without necessarily having any specific plans.
Yeah, though in Universal’s case, it seems like they were willing to work the same process, but they have some fundamental issues with what they’re trying to turn into their MCU that’s tripped them up. They’re horror movie properties, but if you’re spending MCU-levels of money, you can’t make horror movies, you have to make action movies. So that’s a problem, right off the (vampire) bat. Also, they’re trying to base everything on their existing IPs, but their existing IPs are basically… nothing. A bunch of characters from public domain books that used to have unique, trademarkable character designs that… they’d never use because they’re old and now seen as completely generic and cliche. (“Creature from the Black Lagoon” being the one exception - only they were beaten to the punch by Guillermo del Toro, who made a better “Creature” movie than they were ever going to make.)
I think DC’s approach being a jumbled mess has actually worked in their favor. If they were serious about the Marvel approach, that would have meant being stuck in the Snyderverse, and most of their better movies would never have been made. They would have been trapped trying to match the tone and story of something that wasn’t working. The greater creative freedom of not trying to make all the movies be connected results in better movies. (If they’re still bad, imagine how much worse they could have been.)
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I want the Robert Crumb Cinematic Universe… (And a sequel to both “Mystery Men” and “Buckaroo Banzai”)
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I keep repeating my idea of a Bruce Wayne who became Batman by accident, not wanting to be a vigilante but using the Batman persona to distract from the real work done to make things better in Gotham. The death of his parents making him not hate criminals, but the injustices that made men like Joe Chill.
Have weekly adventures where Bruce tries to not be Batman, but his friends keep convincing him to use the persona. Be fun, if scary.
Editing to add that the villains lend themselves well to being even more monied than Wayne himself is. Penguin? Obviously a Trump pastiche. Scarecrow? The guy behind conspiracy theories. Joker? The only true psycho, the other “supervillains” are just glory hounds and Gordon uses Batman as a lure.
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