Warner Brothers want to call a mulligan on the DC Comics cinematic universe

That was my favorite recent reboot:

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They were certainly more than willing to have good natured fun with the characters.

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Yeah, I didn’t get into this because my comment was already long, but I actually think DC would be better served by trying the opposite of what Marvel has done. Options are a great thing. I love the MCU, I really do. But, as you pointed out, DC’s best films have been either completely unconnected to the DCEU, like Joker, or have plots that don’t connect to the other DCEU stories except in superficial ways (the first Wonder Woman movie). The downside of Marvel’s approach is that it is unlikely to produce many truly unique, ground breaking, critically acclaimed, film masterpieces. They just don’t give the directors and writers enough freedom to do that. Not that they haven’t made some great movies, because they have (Winter Soldier and Black Panther really stand out, imo), but none of their films are likely to win Best Picture. DC/WB could just decide to be the anti-MCU, and make more one-off films that are just trying to be really great movies. Shit, hire Martin Scorsese, give him complete artistic freedom, and tell him to go make a superhero movie he’d actually watch. They might as well, because they’re not going to beat Marvel at the shared universe game at this point.

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Decades and decades, if we count the Adam West, Lynda Carter, and Christopher Reeve material

Have audiences even noticed DC is trying to do a unified continuity?

I mean, Stargirl and The Batman are probably the best live-action DC properties right now, and neither of them have anything to do with the DCEU, or with each other for that matter

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My recent concept of an outside-the-box DC film would be Jack Black as a loud, obnoxious Batman who terrifies people without actually hurting anybody, versus Keanu Reeves as a Joker who barely speaks but leaves a trail of gruesomely mutilated corpses in his wake

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If you aren’t careful, you end up with real shitshows like Magnolia, which are so off brand, that they completely destroy the concept of branding.

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It’s all gonna turn into Rick and Morty.

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I want a Mystery Men that actually includes Bob Burden’s characters, like Flaming Carrot!

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[Turn down yr volume after the END ‘card.’ Trust me.]

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The Green Lantern Cartoon was actually good. at least.

That’s the thing that’s always puzzled me about DC. How can the people who make such good animated universes make such awful cinematic ones?

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do you mean the cw?

on that front, the arrowverse is not terrible. the universe they have doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense granted - even after collapsing them all into a single world ( aka tv network ) why do they so rarely ask each other for help?

i think it’s all good ( well, mostly… ) small screen stuff, even if im not the target audience for most of it.

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It’s not even a single world—Stargirl, Naomi, and the Superman shows are still in three different universes, even after the “Crisis” :roll_eyes:

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and yet it’s the same actor playing superman who appeared as superman in supergirl. so confusing

( i’m really liking both naomi and the new superman. it’s good stuff imo )

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No, they’re in the same universe :face_with_monocle:

Stargirl (read carefully) is something else, based on the retro “Justice Society” stories

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im not convinced that superman isn’t in it’s own universe, or at least that they’re leaving that option open. bunches of the story don’t make sense if there are other heroes around

yeah, i got you. it just feels to me that all the new shows are written as if they are outside the arrowverse, each in their own world

( while i want to like stargirl, it hasn’t jelled with me, possibly because demons aren’t really my jam. )

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I liked the first season

The cast is good, my expectations were low

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It’s all conspicuous consumerism. People who decided for one reason or another that they didn’t like the MCU, and backed the DCEU as an alternative. And because the DCEU had to beat Marvel, anything in it is good and needs to survive, and as a result they aggressively push for and defend the franchise.

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I’m still salty they cancelled Constantine after one season.

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The animated series was produced by a subsidiary company, which understood what it was doing.

They knew that they had to run 20+ episodes per series, so they had to have strong stories before they went to the animators. And that if they wanted story arcs, or callbacks, they could do that because there was a production schedule that allowed for it whilst they assembled those stories.

Also animation is fairly inexpensive compared to live action in some ways. You can level a city in a fight between the Justice League and Darkseid, and animating it won’t cost you much more than animating a similar length scene of a round-table discussion between the League members. By contrast the live action equivalents will have a huge cost difference between them.

That lower cost brings a huge advantage - less executive oversight. When millions are being spent on a few minutes of screentime, executives feel that they have to have some kind of control. So the animated series are protected by a combination of having a “subsidiary” management structure above them, and by having a lower budget. The creative people report to their bosses in the animation company, who view their job as being to keep the main company off everyone’s backs. So long as the budget is OK, they can manage that.

With the live action films, the huge cost means that you have cautious executives saying things like “Hey, our Batman films make money and are dark and edgy. That must be why they’re successful. So make Superman dark and edgy, will ya?”

That is, of course, a monumentally dumb request. The Big Blue Boy Scout should never be dark and edgy. But if you want the budget, you have to do what the executives say.

Which is why the DCEU has been such a complete mess.

By contrast, Marvel set up their own production company to keep Disney’s execs away from the process and avoid this kind of interference. Marvel Studios shares a lot more with Warner Brothers Animation as a company than it does with the film side of Warner Brothers. Given the much larger budgets involved it was a huge risk, but after a few successes Disney execs realised that it was working and left Marvel Studios (mostly) alone. This left the Disney execs with enough free time to create bold, exciting successes like live reboots of the cherished animated films of our childhoods. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

tl;dr - WB needs to have the courage to create subsidiaries to shield its storytellers from executive interference. It needs to tell its own executives to stick their heads where the sun don’t shine. Unfortunately, that is very unlikely to happen.

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Aw jeez.

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