Ezra Miller stars as Barry Allen on Warner Bros. “Flash.”
Discovery Warner Bros
“Sparkle” is flap. Black Adam was a flop. Anyone remember Shazam: Fury of the Gods?
DC Studios needs greater than a hero, it needs a latest strategy – something different from even the recently established reboot plan.
DC and its parent company, Discovery Warner Brosmake the envy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is simple to see why. MCU movies, including those not released by Disneyhave grossed roughly $30 billion worldwide since 2008. Warner Bros. CEO Discovery’s David Zaslav tasked DC Studios co-founders James Gunn and Peter Safran with creating their very own shared universe featuring iconic characters like Batman and Superman.
The issue is that Warner Bros. and DC are already working to wrap up a previous – and failed – attempt to pair their characters across multiple movies and shows. Within the Justice League movies, DC just cannot compare to Marvel’s Avengers.
The likely answer to Warner Bros. and DC, nevertheless, is correct ahead: character-specific franchises that follow one filmmaker’s vision, not a television-style writers’ room. Principally, let your heroes fly solo.
This has worked for DC properties before, even recently.
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Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which resulted in 2012, was a well-reviewed box office giant. And while each were tied to DC’s earlier attempt to create a cinematic universe, 2017’s “Wonder Woman” and 2018’s “Aquaman” focused heavily on their title characters and garnered big bucks and accolades in the method.
To place it even higher, just take a look at the financial and important success of Todd Phillips’ Joker and Matt Reeves’ The Batman. No movie is connected to the expanded universe.
“Joker”, released in 2019, grossed over $1 billion worldwide despite being R-rated, while also winning a Best Actor Oscar for star Joaquin Phoenix. Last 12 months’s Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as an aspiring cloaked crusader, grossed an estimated $750 million worldwide. Sequels to each movies are in development.
But so is Batman: The Brave and the Daring by Flash director Andy Muschietti. Pattinson is not going to star in it, and as an alternative he’ll function “introduction of Batman DCUaccording to Gunn. How many various Batmans does the superhero-saturated cinema audience need? Especially after “The Flash”, wherein 4 different Dark Knights from previous movies and shows.
Fun versus homework
Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Disney
Comics used to be an escape from homework. Now, to sustain with the whole lot that is happening in Disney’s MCU and Sony’s Spider-Verse, which can also be connected to the MCU, you will need to watch just about the whole lot that got here before to speed things up. That is dozens of films and shows dating back to the unique “Iron Man” by Robert Downey Jr.
Meanwhile, “The Flash” would be the comics’ most intense pop quiz, despite the fact that DC’s cinematic universe was all over the place. It’s stuffed with scenes (some real, some CGI-generated) from previous DC movies and shows, stretching all the best way back to George Reeves’ black-and-white Superman.
But to understand all of the gags, you’ve got to really dig into it. Unless you are a giant fan of Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” director – a large enough fan to watch his specials, that’s – the “Flash” sequence featuring Nicolas Cage’s version of Superman fight with a large spider may lose you. The film’s punch line, with George Clooney reprising his role as Bruce Wayne 26 years after the badly received Batman & Robin, is clearly geared towards Generation X and older millennials, not today’s younger audience.
Even the MCU model got stuck sometimes. Disney CEO Bob Iger himself suggested that the studio went to the well too often with some characters after the fourth Thor movie and the third Ant-Man part disenchanted on the box office. This ought to be one other warning sign for DC Studios.
For his part, DC’s Gunn recently admitted that they exist too many superhero movies and shows. If anyone can consider a creative way to change course, it’s him.
After early working with Schlock’s Troma Movies factory, Gunn has built a solid Hollywood profession as a author and director, alternating between R-rated movies equivalent to “Slither” and wide audience material equivalent to his Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel and Disney. The third entry within the series snapped the MCU out of its mini funk. It’s the second highest-grossing film of 2023 thus far, behind Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. movies.
And he already has some DC work on his CV: the 2020 movie “The Suicide Squad” and the accompanying 2022 series “Peacemaker” which have garnered widespread acclaim.
Gunn is writing and directing Superman: Legacy, which is ready for release in 2025. It is meant to usher in a latest DC shared universe. But he still has time to reconsider his approach and let the Man of Steel – and all of DC’s other heroes – be super on their very own.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Universal and CNBC.