It's been a while since I've written here, but it's not like anyone was reading this anyway.
"The Problem"
The recent rumors of WB's planned DC slate over the next few years has been generating a lot of commentary online and in social media, most of it skeptical and not nearly enough excited. The conventional wisdom is that WB just doesn't "get it," and is rushing to market an inferior product to compete with Marvel and to ride the wave created by Marvel's success, and to a lesser extent the success of the Dark Knight Trilogy.
I have several problems with the conventional wisdom, but first, a disclaimer: I am a DC fanboy. Like, hard. I love all comics, love a lot of Marvel comics as well, and have been thoroughly ensorceled by their cinematic efforts. But DC Comics are my religion. Superman. Batman. Wonder Woman. This is my trinity. Where you see the S-Shield or Bat symbol, I see a cross or star of David. These characters are gods among men, the stuff of legend and myth.
Marvel likes to tout how "real" their heroes are, and to a certain extent it works for them, but it's also what makes them just a little less impressive. DC heroes inspire such an immense sense of wonder, and dwell in a realm of the unbelievable, that elevates them from mere superheroes and turns them into iconography.
So, then, why is this so hard?
"The Competition"
One thing needs to be made abundantly clear: Warner Brothers is not competing with Marvel.
Marvel has amassed astonishing critical and commercial success following a tight, cost-effective strategy employing unique directing choices and fantastic, but affordable (save for Downey), casting. Marvel is the Tampa Bay Rays at their peak; a small market wonder competing at the highest possible level and making all the right moves. Now that they have Disney backing them, they also have a safety net.
Warner Brothers is the Yankees. This is the studio of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings (WB acquired New Line Cinema in 2008), The Dark Knight, Superman, The Matrix, Lethal Weapon, The Exorcist, Bonnie and Clyde, All the President's Men, The Goonies, The Color Purple, Goodfellas, JFK, The Fugitive, Heat, and Space Jam, just to name a few.
Warner Brothers has been making movies longer than Superman, Captain America, or even Mickey Mouse has existed. They're competing with the very history of the film industry that they helped establish, not Marvel.
Put another way, this is Tesla vs. GM. Tesla is a fascinating company making an amazing, cutting-edge product. GM is an industry giant that has been making Cadillacs and Corvettes since before my dad was born.
We're creating a false equivalency between Marvel movies and DC movies driven purely by their histories as comic book companies, where Marvel has enjoyed much more recent and consistent success. That means nothing to Warner Brothers. To them, DC is just a bin full of properties waiting to make them money, and Marvel is just the new kid on the block.
If you get anything out of this post, it should be that comparing the mechanics of the Marvel cinematic universe to any kind of DC cinematic universe is useless. The relationship between Marvel and its movies is much closer, and has far fewer moving parts, than DC and the movies Warner Brothers intends to make. It isn't helpful, nor does it necessarily make any sense. I know this is futile, and comparisons are inevitable, but these movies are going to succeed or fail based on whether or not they are actually good movies, bottom line.
Rest assured, Warner Brothers knows how to make a successful movie, and are not feeling pressure from the success of Marvel.
"The Real Problem"
This brings us to the real problem, one that we can't really gauge.
Marvel's cinematic efforts are headed by Kevin Feige and an advisory board of sorts including the likes of Joe Quesada and Brian Bendis. These are all people who are invested in the Marvel properties themselves and in being stewards of those properties, and telling great stories with them. This helps them to make movies that honor hardcore fans, while still appealing to a broader crowd and making piles of cash for their relatively shiny and new corporate overlords.
Warner Brothers is a movie studio run by movie studio executives. They aren't beholden to DC Comics one bit. They formed DC Entertainment as a subsidiary that now contains DC Comics, and installed Geoff Johns as Chief Creative Officer, in order to better manage their properties. Their goal isn't to tell great stories, so much as it is to tell great stories in the sauna at their club while they use the piles of cash they make off of our childhood memories to stoke the fires. That's not to say they don't care about or respect the fanbase. That's why they chose Geoff Johns as CCO. It was a nod to fans meant to reassure them, but at the same time, it serves their purposes.
They didn't put a straight-up comics guy like Jim Lee in there. Sure, Johns is an amazing comic writer, probably the best we have today, but he got his start in the movie business working for Richard Donner. It makes sense, Johns is the best of both worlds. He's a DC Comics insider, but he also knows how the industry works, and where his bread is buttered. So when push comes to shove, WB can be sure he'll do what's right for the bottom line.
I mean, he endorsed the Green Lantern movie. Maybe he really did think it was great, but we all know otherwise. Deep down, he probably does too. They put this property, which is probably the hardest DC property to fully realize given the breadth and scope of the fiction, into the hands of movie people (a mildly successful TV writer, and a James Bond director) who didn't really understand what they had or how to fully execute on it. (Why did a movie about an intergalactic policeman spend so much time down on Earth alone, and so little time in space with the thousands of alien space cops?)
They took the material and made what they thought a comic book movie about Green Lantern should look like, but they didn't make a Green Lantern movie.
And that's the real problem here.
DC fans can't be sure they're ever going to see the movies they want to see, the way Marvel fans have. The men in charge are businessmen, not DC guys. They have no real connection to the material, other than a desire to use the properties to make successful films.
But fan service can mean big business. They saw that first-hand with Harry Potter. They were remarkably faithful to the material, given the amount they needed to cover, and were rewarded with piles and piles of money of many different colors from many different lands.
Hopefully, they've learned whatever lessons from Green Lantern they had to learn. Man of Steel, while polarizing and definitely far from perfect, was a step in the right direction at least in aesthetic and tone (though I could do for a little more hope and joy in my Superman), and did some solid world-building for this new universe.
Now, with Batman VS Superman, they need to step it up. They need to get the Batman/Superman dynamic right. They need to get Wonder Woman right ( I have doubts). If they can pull that off, Justice League has a shot at being the biggest movie the world's ever seen.
NEXT: A Nerd Herder in the League?
