Future of DC Films (DCEU)
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ShadowGuardian
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Translation: I'm not going to be in the new movies at all, but we'll keep it classy and not outright say it.
Gunn is in full on 84 Terminator mode.
I blame those morons at WB for such poor handling after Nolan split. Some key people were hired like Affleck and Cavill but the people handling them made such a colossal balls of it that people like Gunn had to come in and nuke the mess.
I blame those morons at WB for such poor handling after Nolan split. Some key people were hired like Affleck and Cavill but the people handling them made such a colossal balls of it that people like Gunn had to come in and nuke the mess.
Also translation. Marvel I'm available and I'm always rooting for you guys to succeed too (and the Gunnverse is gonna stink, why? Do you smell what the rock's cooking that's why!).
MeatHookGekko
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My best guess is Black Adam moving to a TV show format.
Peacemaker was well received by fans and critics and was on HBO Max. The Rock has a relationship with HBO from Ballers. Gunn has proven he can take a wrestler and headline a super hero series ( Cena )
That keeps Black Adam out of film universe, but allows a more expansive storytelling format and can take advantage of Rock's general world wide appeal. There would also be a lot more creative freedom in a TV series than a film series.
The Rock can be fun to watch. If you put him in something like The Rundown, he's fantastic. If you put him in something like Ballers, it will make your eyes bleed.
Gunn can tell Rock that if he makes the TV series successful enough, then the pathway to another leap into a sequel as a film is much simpler. I would say that's a fair compromise between the two. Enough big name actors are doing TV, so it's not like it's a huge step down for The Rock here.
Let's be honest, Black Adam was pretty disjointed. It has way too many plot points to cover in too little time. A TV show lets you slow burn the narrative a little. Some things might end up better on TV. For example Enders Game. Or Dune. Where you need way more time to cover the story and honor the original narrative.
At some point, you gotta hope The Rock figures out it's absolutely OK to be a big action star. There's no shame in it. He doesn't have to be an actor for all roles and all circumstances. It's OK to focus on being good at the things that got you to fame in the first place.
I’m happy James Gunn is blowing it all up. Scrap everything and start fresh. End it all. Joker Musical, Battison, Rock Adam, Cavill Superman.
Let the past die, kill it if you have to. That is the only way the DC Universe becomes what it was meant to be.
What they really need to do is copy Marvel phase for phase.
Phase 1
Introduction movies for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman. Build to Justice League which would introduce one of Cyborg or Martian Manhunter. Set up Darkseid early as the Thanos threat. And build from there.
Let the past die, kill it if you have to. That is the only way the DC Universe becomes what it was meant to be.
What they really need to do is copy Marvel phase for phase.
Phase 1
Introduction movies for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman. Build to Justice League which would introduce one of Cyborg or Martian Manhunter. Set up Darkseid early as the Thanos threat. And build from there.
Yep. That way we get to see Gunns version of Justice League in 2067. That’s what I call a giant Win for DC fans.
They tried rushing things once and look how that turned out. Failed universe. 3-4 years to develop a movie. Likely could have Phase 1 from 2025-2027.
Not like they can plan, write, cast, shoot, edit a movie in one year.
It didn't fail because they rushed. They failed because they panicked rather than just sticking to the plan.
The only thing they needed to do like the MCU was hold the line. BvS UE would have gotten better reviews, possibly David Ayer's Suicide Squad too, Wonder Woman was loved and so was ZSJL. We would have had Aquaman, Batfleck solo, Cyborg, Flash, ZSJL 2 and 3 and then a flashpoint-style story to re-arrange the universe.
The MCU didn't panic when The Incredible Hulk brought in under 300 million or when Captain America brought in under 400 million. They stayed the course and it paid off.
These phases from Marvel are new thing. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Aunt Beru didn't need a solo movie and neither did Samwise Gamgee.
I think a big part of the reason why it failed was because it wasn’t just rushed, but because it was severely mishandled, had no plan, and genuinely sucked.
2013 they push out Man of Steel, with no real foundation like Feige had, hoping it would be their Iron Man and it wasn’t anything special, if anything they had the right actor but went the wrong direction. I don’t see many comic fans, let alone the average movie goer have much praise, or hype, or love for that movie.
The reason Feige and Marvel stuck with it was because they had success with Iron Man and a long term plan. Thor and Captain America were still Top 10 movies in 2011. They didn’t necessarily bombed. And they knew what they were building to. Then the MCU blew up with Avengers, that didn’t happen with DC.
Years go by and DC is rushing. They just watched Iron Man 3 destroy MOS at the box office. They watched all these projects get announced, they see GOTG, Age of Ultron, Winter Soldier, etc. in the Marvel pipeline. So what do they do? They rush an awful Batman vs Superman movie out.
Enter 2016. Batman vs Superman should have been built up like Civil War’s Captain America vs Iron Man, over years, with some actual tension between these versions of the characters, but it wasn’t, because it was rushed. They rushed it and the reviews from critics, comic fans, and the average movie goer tore it all to shreds. Genuinely bad movie with a couple cool scenes. An Ultimate Edition or whatever UE stands for isn’t going to save it in the average movie goers eyes and as it turns out, it didn’t.
Next is the Suicide Squad. Instead of introducing these charcters over the course of years, building them up (including their biggest most well known villain, Joker), seeing them defeated. then bringing them together (like Marvel is doing with Thunderbolts), then redemption in the movie itself, they pushed them all into one garbage movie with the worst portrayal of a comic character I ever had the displeasure of watching. And like BvS, the movie sucked, no one liked it. Absolutely rushed.
Now we are onto 2017 where a surprisingly not bad Wonder Woman releases. Outside the artificially inflated scores from RT due to peak SJW-era review politics, the movie was solid. It gave some small measure of hope for the DCEU.
Then it all came crashing down with Justice League. A movie that, like all the others, was abundantly rushed, thrown together, and tries to introduce multiple characters within a short runtime and utterly fails. I’d say Zach Snyder’s Justice League version that released 4 years later was better, but it really wasn’t much joy getting to stare at Aquaman’s sweater or a slow scene coffee trip, which ironically enough, are the only scenes I remember from the 4 hour nightmare Snyder made.
But hey, we got that dude from Game of Thrones playing the guy that talks to fish and by god they somehow hit a billion. And yet again, mixed audience reactions, mixed reviews. I guess the DC Universe **** the bed literally at this point, because I’m not sure how many people are going to watch an Aquaman 2 with famed domestic abuser Amber Heard in oh wait they totally reshoot the movie to remove her? Over budget too? Reworked the story? What could possibly go wrong!
2019 we get Shazam. Not a Batman solo movie, not a Flash movie, not a Green Lantern movie, not another Justice League movie, but Shazam. Ok. Hey it was good! Does anyone care at this point though? Welp, just as the DCEU sees a little hope it comes crashing down.
2020 we get some rushed Harley Quinn movie with some other girls audiences don’t know or care about and it bombed.
Ok but Wonder Woman 2 is out aaaaand it bombed.
Ok but THE Suicide Squad is out now. And somehow James Gunn pulled off a mostly positively received movie that somehow spawned into an even better received TV show Peacemaker.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the guy who plays Flash is a certified nutjob as well.
So, the above is their foundation and the “plan” they didn’t stick to.
Seemed pretty smart to dump it all. A direct to HBO Max Zach Snyder’s Justice League wasn’t watched by many at all considering POS movies like Godzilla vs Kong and Mortal Kombat matched it and 1/3 of the viewers didn’t even finish it after a week (if ever), surely the grounds to continue ZSJL2 and ZSJL3 did not exist except in the minds of Zach Snyder’s online cult.
The DCEU would have been the biggest modern franchise failure ever if Star Wars didn’t exist so it can’t even be the best at failing.
James Gunn made two great projects out of nothing for DC, one becoming a mega hit in Peacemaker. He turned GOTG characters into household names. The dude is a magician, he knows what works. He looked at the DCEU and saw it for the Amber Heard pile of bed **** that it was.
Firstly, I love All Might, so great choice in username and avatar.
I think you're going to get a lot of people disagreeing with you, but you do make some good points. I do like/love fragments of the DCEU, but there were movies that I hated when seeing at the cinema like BvS, Justice League and Suicide Squad (2016). Thankfully BvS was vastly improved by the Ultimate Edition, and while I didn't love ZSJL, it was better than the theatrical version - I completely agree about the scene where they just start randomly singing when Aquaman leaves and the meet cute Flash coffee shop scene - but there were other bits that were vastly better.
Ultimately, I do agree with you in that it probably is a good idea to just start again if they want a cohesive, single universe. Personally, it would have been nice if they just made a bunch of independent movies (think The Batman and Joker) and scraped the shared movie universe and left that for the animated universe. This way they can keep Superman going with Henry Cavill, and movies like Aquaman 2 and Shazam 2 won't be meaningless from a dead universe. Obviously, Gunn wants his own Superman and DC vision, so now we get to wait years with bated breath for the first movie.
I think we're at the end of the superhero movie wave, and WB/DC are probably too late to capitalise on it unless they knock it out of the park early like the MCU did with Iron Man and Avengers. Connecting everything like the MCU is now doing with TV shows and movies builds fatigue, especially when the quality is highly variable like phase 4 has been. Noting that DC also wants to connect their animated universe, a medium that has a limited audience, and they could be asking too much from the audience. Imagine trying to keep up with both Marvel and DC...
Did Feige really have an Infinity Saga planned in 2008? From what I've heard they didn't even have Civil War planned until BvS was announced. I know Snyder planned on Batman in MoS2 before MoS came out and had his 5 film arc was planned in 2014. There was a plan whether you liked the idea or not.
They started panicking in 2016 because the 2nd movie in a franchise didn't hit 1 billion (other than the TDK has any 2nd movie done so?) and some internet nerds didn't like it. It only got worse from there as they deviated from the plan. I haven't personally met anyone in real life that hates it. You can pile all you want onto the DCEU from then on it doesn't matter it's already done.
The audience reviews for BvS range from above average to okay and that's for the theatrical cut. The UE has good reviews. ZSJL came out to stellar reviews and is joint highest on rotten tomatoes with The Dark Knight.
Also, you seem to be using SAMBA TV numbers, if you look into SAMBA it does give a slice of data but there is very much it doesn't cover. Plus WB has been proven to have falsely reported financial information and success over the last few years so was Peacemaker really that successful, how would we really know?
BvS was divisive, no doubt about it, so was The Empire Strikes Back. If WB just held its nerve until after Justice League it would have paid dividends.
Look at the shares for WB over the last 9 years. The peak is March 2021, the weekend ZSJL came out. It hit $77 per share. Since Gunn has been given the job it is at its lowest in a decade and clipping into less than $9. The second lowest point was Justice League 2017 release. Can you look at this and say Snyderverse has no worth?
Thanks. I’m not really all that into anime but something about MHA is just awesome to me. Became a diehard fan after watching a few episodes lol.
Yeah, a lot will disagree, here especially where we are all diehard fans of pop culture in general, so there is bound to be strong opinions one side or the other.
I agree with you about missing the train. Movie genres fade in and out. It seems like the super hero genre could begin that fade (has it already?) by the time DC gets up and running again. Then again, I could see DC reigniting it again with their characters. People might just be tired of Marvel at this point. I’m even tired of Marvel at this point with some of their releases. Which isn’t a good sign when diehards like myself are tired, probably only worse for everyone else.
Didn’t Marvel need to get a loan for the movies and used the heroes rights as collateral? Safe to say they had a solid long term outline of the end goal. They teased Thanos all the way back in 2012. Nothing would have ran this smooth or be this good without a great plan. See Star Wars for proof of that, no plan, bad movies.
You seem to be part of the Synder Cult, I don’t really converse with you folks much but I’ll try my best not to laugh.
They panicked in 2016 because Batman didn’t hit a billion after The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises did. Batman with Superman should have easily cleared a billion. It wasn’t just “internet nerds“ that didn’t like it. IMDB score is a 6.4, which is quite awful for that review platform. RT score was in the toilet and usually RT overrates movies, not underrates. Even the RT audience score, which is known to be “rigged” in instances isn’t even that high, it is low 60s. And that’s just from people who were passionate enough to leave negative or positive reviews. The reception of the movie itself spoke volumes because nobody cared about it the minute they walked out the theater. Compare that to Civil War. Huge difference.
Of course the UE has good reviews, it is from those who cared enough to watch it again because they liked the 2nd so much. Fact is that wasn’t the product shown on screen. I can recut a lot of stuff and make it better too, doesn’t mean it should be given another chance.
As far as ZSJL, you really compared it to The Dark Knight? Come on. It is the same case with BvS UE, only those who cared enough to watch it are going to watch it, they are inherently biased. That is why The Dark Knight has 10x the reviews that ZSJL has. That is an awful argument to use to support when one has 25k reviews all from the biased Snyder Cult and the other has 250k+ reviews from the general population. No sane person who hated the direction of JL was going to watch a 4 hour cut of ZSJL.
As far as WB lying about success, you claim they could have lied about Peacemaker, but not anything else from Snyder right? Not manipulating reviews or demand? Because wasn’t it Snyder Cultists who used bots to boost the popularity of the Snyder Cut and demand of the Snyder Cut? Pretty sure it was.
The fact that you even compared BvS to Empire Strikes Back really makes me believe you are a Snyder Cultist. I really have no response for that, it speaks for itself I suppose.
Yeah, thanks for posting that share chart, it really proves my point. You see how it started so high with hopes? Then crashed and burned within a week? Perfect glimpse of the DCEU. It doesn’t hold value.
As far as current prices, Gunn has nothing to do with that. That is restructuring charges from the merger. It was a story a week ago on many financial sites. At least argue in good faith man. Sheesh.
ShadowGuardian
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I find superhero/comicbook movie fatigue to be a really interesting discussion point. People have been talking about superhero fatigue for the past 6 years, but as is evident by films like Infinity War/Endgame, Joker, Black Panther 1, Wonder Woman, even Aquaman, etc there was still a massive hype machine from the masses back in the late 2010s.
I am of the opinion that comicbook movie fatigue is genuinely setting in now; it isn't an overnight shift but I think we have been getting there since 2020. There are a lot of reasons for that. For one, Endgame wrapped up a massive decade long narrative for the MCU behemoth. For a lot of people, that was the end of their investment in the MCU and comicbook movies in general. Sure many may still watch the new content, but there is less of that genuine underlying interest in it, and so people may only watch if convenient or if they have nothing better to do. In a sense people are less compelled to watch, and so they are more likely to pick an alternative movie or activity.
Second, I think quality has dipped on all fronts. DC has been... well DC. Yeah we got The Batman (which is phenomenal), but Batman is one of the few characters who will always perform well. It helps when we haven't gotten a universally praised live action Batman film since 2008. Everything else in the past few years though? Nobody watched Birds of Prey and while fun, it's turn your brain off mediocre fun. You won't remember it the next week. Wonder Woman 1984 got dumped onto streaming and so somewhat gets lost in wall to wall content, so less watched it, and it was also one of the worst DC movies of the entire DCEU. It's not even overly memorable for how bad it is like Suicide Squad (2016), it's just complete dog ****. Then we got THE Suicide Squad, which I personally love and exceeded all my expectations. But not a lot of people watched it, and while perceptions have changed on the impact of an R rating on box office performance, I think it still plays somewhat of a role. Black Adam completely under-performed at the box office; in real life basically none of my friends saw it except the hardcore DC fans and they thought it was bad to meh (which seems to be the same consensus online). I forgot ZSJL, which is a bit of an anomaly considering everything around it, but it is definitely a film for the fans and not for everyone. I don't know any non-nerds who haven't sat down to watch a 4 hour redo of a film that bombed 4 years prior.
I won't discuss all the Marvel projects of the past few years because there are just too damn many, but since Endgame we got X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Spider-Man: Far From Home and No Way Home, The New Mutants, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Venom 2, Eternals, Morbius, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther 2, WandaVision, Falcon & Winter Soldier, Loki, What if, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She Hulk, Werewolf by Night and the GOTG Holiday Special.
I've completely avoided non-Marvel and DC content like The Boys (which would easily be one of the best things out of everything I've listed despite a less satisfactory season 3), but all of that content just adds to the noise. Of all the DC & Marvel projects I have listed, I think the trend (especially when compared to what has come before), is everything is either mediocre to bad. Sure, some may give a positive thumbs up to a lot of these, but is anybody raving about them like the Avengers? Or Civil War? What about Joker? Or even The Dark Knight? I think The Batman, The Suicide Squad, ZSJL, and No Way Home are the only great films there, and 2 of those are only really loved in the fan communities; TSS and ZSJL have not had the commercial success.
As this wall of text implies, getting to my third and final point, is that there is simply too much content that has dulled peoples senses or interest in these wacky comicbook worlds. With streaming taking off like never before, we have seen a massive influx in television shows that have higher budgets, shows that need to look and feel connected to films. With that, TV also takes significantly more time investment from the viewer than the occasional 2 hour movie. Not to mention with the way Disney + is structured, there is literally a new episode of something every single week. I'd have to check to confirm with 100% certainty, but between Star Wars and Marvel I believe there was a new episode of something every week in 2022. It is a constant bombardment of content. Most people have lives outside of comicbooks, and at some point, something's got to give. Other truly more important things take priority, and that is much easier to do when you can't keep up with everything and the quality is declining, and you just kind of stop caring about these cinematic universes.
Sorry for the long winded post, but in summary I'm saying I think superhero fatigue has genuinely been setting in during the early 2020s because of 1) the end of a massive saga and some of the most beloved characters in the MCU, 2) a significant drop in quality content, and 3) true over saturation of content, when there is something literally every week.
ironwez20
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Pretty spot on but you’ll have some in the thread acting like the plan was perfect and it was always going to be good.
The movies sucked. Plain and simple. It had good moments but they made very little money and it divided fans. They were divisive movies and they needed movies everyone loved. And yes they were rushed movies trying to play catch up to the mcu. Nothing deep or thought provoking about them .
Sure a long-time plan makes sense, but when does it not? That doesn't mean they had one, especially one that stretched that far. Yes, they teased Thanos in 2012, 4 years after they started. The same amount of time between the first MCU movie and the first DCEU movie except after 4 years the DCEU more than teased Darkseid.
It was replacing TDK trilogy with a new Batman it was always going to need to get going. No new Batman has made as much since 1989. 6.4 doesn't mean it was hated, it means it wasn't loved. Civil War was the 13th movie after 8 years and the 3rd team-up, hardly a great comparison.
Does than mean that everyone that voted for The Batman is inherently biased because only 10k have voted on it? You hated the way it was going and you watched it.
No, it was proven the number of bots was very low at 13%.
They are both the second darker movie that ends on a downer.
It doesn't prove that at all. The CEO of WB came out and said it was a storytelling Cul-De-Sac after 3 days.
Calling me Snyder Cultist because I'm a fan of his and I don't share your opinion says way more about you than it does me.
I pretty much have the same mindset as you and have the same view on all the movies you mentioned. I just don't care about the MCU post-Endgame, except for Spider-Man. I tried watching the start of Phase 4, but the mediocrity killed it for me. Also, in terms of run time we've probably had more in Phase 4 than 1-3 combined - it's just too much, and if you miss something from a show (say Wandavision) then a movie may not make sense (like why Wanda is bad in DS2).
I'd give The Boys a go, as it's excellent and better than any MCU show.
The reason I call you a Snyder Cultist is because you went to the ends of the earth to defend it with ridiculous comparisons and borderline likely unintentional lies all while not discussing these things in good faith. This has been the same experience I’ve had with any Snyder Cultist. For example:
- You make up things about their stock prices that are unfounded and untrue.
- You compared BvS (trash) to Empire Strikes Back (one of the greatest movies ever made) as if BvS is somehow similar in any way to ESB. I’m still confused by this.
- You claim WB lied about success then brush away the verified reports of the Snyder Bot Army artificially inflating demand. No good movie needs bots.
I’m not sure why you keep going after Marvel either for not having a plan (despite universal praise and clear evidence of a general outline at worse, with even more evidence of 4-5 year plans with an overarching goal) but talk about Snyder’s ”plan” that regardless of if it even being a plan or not was rushed and poorly thought out. Marvel did it right and showed the popularity of the genre and DC did it wrong.
It didn’t have to get going. Any average Batman movie before covid was going to clear a billion if done right. They rushed and tried to play catch up. Civil War is the perfect comparison because that was the movie they were competing against. That was the movie that did it right, that built their universe, made us care for those character, then have them fight.
As far as RT audience score goes, they changed it in 2019 I think, for verified users only, dropping the amount of scores. Which to me, just makes the base reviewing movies that much more biased and artificially raises scores across the board in most cases in my opinion.
generalszabo
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The current DC movies weren't working so fair enough, let's restart it and see what happens. Snyder had his limited run, let's move on, what gunn does could be amazing, I'm just sad I have to wait so long to see if it's going to work
There was no salvaging the mess they got themselves into, aquaman and flash seem uncertain and it's clear they didn't know what to do with the multitude of great comic characters they had at their disposal. Hopefully gunn will have a long game plan and will learn from the mistakes made by his predecessors. Hopefully we'll get an actual batman with actual batcave and batmobile. We can mourn the death of what could have been, but at the end of the day we're stuck with gunn now. It can't be worse that what we've already seen
There was no salvaging the mess they got themselves into, aquaman and flash seem uncertain and it's clear they didn't know what to do with the multitude of great comic characters they had at their disposal. Hopefully gunn will have a long game plan and will learn from the mistakes made by his predecessors. Hopefully we'll get an actual batman with actual batcave and batmobile. We can mourn the death of what could have been, but at the end of the day we're stuck with gunn now. It can't be worse that what we've already seen
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