Post
by Ben » February 15th, 2017, 4:59 am
Lego is not an acronym!!!
I hated BVS too, for what it was, what it was supposed to be, and what it could have been, and all too many people kept giving it a pass because it gathered DC's holy trinity onscreen for the first time.
Except, those characters were not Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman...maybe they were representiations of versions of those characters from more recent books, but they did not provide a reflection of their 75+ years of stories and personalities.
And that's exactly where WB's DC has been failing since day one. It's no secret that we all know they jumped into an MCU style connected series the wrong way around. Marvel built up a series around one character (Iron Man), initially with two films, then added a third and a fourth, etc, before the team up. Anticipation was there and it was thunderous.
Warners got all excited and have jumped right in - Batman Vs Superman, which wasn't really about that in the end anyway! - was even just a straight Batman and Superman movie! They had to lump Wonder Woman in there and slap the Justice title on it, just two films into their series (and it's debatable whether Man Of Steel is the first or not, since it wasn't designed that way).
And it confuses, too, since it obviously takes place a long time after Bruce Wayne's Bat-career has been happening, so where's all that info and backstory? Does this take place twenty years after the events of the Dark Knight trilogy, as it does actually suggest, or is this a new universe as we have been told, even though that doesn't really tally up.
Best thing would have been for Man Of Steel to follow the Dark Knights. Which it really kind of does, if you think about it. The Wayne Enterprises references were Dark Knight designs, and the film was born from Christopher Nolan's association with Warners. There's no reason Batfleck can't be a later version of Bale's Bats. But there are tons of reasons why the current version of the DC movie univese (them calling it the "extended universe" even points out that WB doesn't even get the right terminology here) doesn't work with throwing in solo character films *after* we've already been introduced to them.
As I've said before, this would have worked a WHOLE lot better if WB hadn't been so quick to jump the gun and gone with this plan:
- Batman Begins, "realistically" showing vigilantism becoming superherorics
- The Dark Knight, introducing the theatricality of fantastical villains
- The Dark Knight Rises, concluding the set-up story but leaving the door open for more
- Man Of Steel, set in this "real" world but bringing in the idea of super or "metahumans"
- Man Of Steel 2, providing us with proof of Superman's good deed doing and reason for Batman to get jealous/become suspicious
- Batman Vs Superman, pretty much as was, but better and with more of Batman actually vs Superman as opposed to him and Wonder Woman essentially hijacking a Superman sequel
- Wonder Woman, introducing the character properly instead of just having her be there
- Justice League, the first teamup, maybe with just Bats, Supes and WW mainly forming the team
- Flash and Aquaman solo movies, providing backstory and their recruitment to the League
- Justice League 2, now with added members!
- continuation of additional solo movies, allowing for lesser-known characters to be successes based on the popular Justice League brand
But...no...Warners had to be lazy and greedy, rebooting the franchise from Man Of Steel onwards and just getting to the Avengers style teamup as soon as possible, throwing out any logic and building of anticipation so that every new movie just comes along as almost it's own thing. Where did Suicide Squad fit in? Not even WB really knew, not specifically selling it as a DC universe movie and only vaguely with any idea where it fit in to their lineup.
(In my ideal above, SS could slot in between BVS and WW, though thematically it would be better after the first JL movie, I think, expanding the universe more at the right time and setting up villains more suitably for JL2.)
Even now, WB aren't sticking to a plan but to what they think we want. So SS is a kinda success? What's that? Everyone loved Harley Quinn? Do we have a Harley Quinn movie in the works? No? So let's add that!
Huh? Everyone thought Batfleck was the best thing in BVS? Let's squeeze him into Suicide Squad so that it feels more part of the DC universe, not that we will then sell the film as such. And let's announce a solo Batman movie prematurely before the star and potential director is even done with the script. Yeah, let's add that!
So there is no plan. And if there is, then it's fluid enough to fluctuate around wildly and not have any cohesion. And this is where WB and DC will continue to fail. In the end we'll have a series of interconnecting films that don't interconnect. Films that will eventually take place in different time periods and locations that don't really match up until we rearrange them ourselves on our shelves.
Yes, the Squad did make mention of Superman being dead, and the Justice Legue will probably come about as a "safer" version of the Squad idea, but this is still all too soon after Superman only practically just arrived on our planet and then died. Yeah, I know he was supposed to have been here a couple of years...but we haven't seen that and we didn't get a good picture of that. He really needed that standalone sequel.
I don't want to get on Snyder's case, as he's obviously well-placed to make these huge films, but he has conversely been given too much autonomy. His fingerprints will be on the next three, four or five DC films to come, and he's apparently a divisive figure *within* the DC world, hence Batfleck's recent actions. The current DC universe got off to a rocky start, and despite all the goodwill and fan apologists, it's not righting itself anytime soon.
If WB had gone with something akin to my suggestion above, they could even have claimed the whole bragging rights thing to having laid the groundwork for the connected universe idea before Marvel. Certainly that version would have been raising the stakes every time instead of series of highs and lows that we're going through now.
The best thing now? Pull the plug now and let Justice League be the big ending before another, proper, reboot.
