Ezra Miller stars as Barry Allen in Warner Bros.’ “The Flash.”
Warner Bros. Discovery
“The Flash” is a flop. “Black Adam” was a bust. And does anyone remember “Shazam: Fury of the Gods”?
DC Studios needs greater than a hero, it needs a latest strategy – something different than even its recently established reboot plan.
DC and its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, have Marvel Cinematic Universe envy. It is easy to see why. The MCU’s movies, including ones that have not been released by Disney, have grossed about $30 billion worldwide since 2008. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has directed DC Studios co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran to create their very own shared universe involving iconic characters like Batman and Superman.
The issue is, Warner Bros. and DC are already working through the tail end of a previous – and failed – try and tie their characters together through multiple movies and shows. At the flicks, DC’s Justice League just cannot measure up against Marvel’s Avengers.
The likely answer to Warner Bros. and DC’s issues is correct in front of them, though: Character-specific franchises that adhere to at least one filmmaker’s vision, not a TV-style writers room. Principally, let your heroes fly solo.
It’s worked for DC properties before, even recently.
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Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which wrapped in 2012, was a well-reviewed box office juggernaut. And though they were each connected to the prior attempt at making a DC movie universe, 2017’s “Wonder Woman” and 2018’s “Aquaman” focused mainly on their title characters and racked up big bucks and accolades in the method.
To place a good finer point on it, look no further than the financial and demanding success of Todd Phillips’ “Joker” and Matt Reeves’ “The Batman.” Neither movie is connected to an prolonged universe.
“Joker,” released in 2019, grossed greater than $1 billion worldwide despite being rated R, while racking up a best actor Oscar for star Joaquin Phoenix. Last 12 months’s “The Batman,” starring Robert Pattinson as an early-career Caped Crusader, garnered around $750 million globally. Sequels to each movies are within the works.
But so is “Batman: The Brave and the Daring,” from “Flash” director Andy Muschietti. It would not star Pattinson and can as a substitute function “the introduction of the DCU Batman,” in line with Gunn. How many alternative Batmen does an already-superhero-saturated moviegoing audience need? Especially after “The Flash,” which featured 4 different Dark Knights from previous movies and shows.
Fun vs. homework
Marvel Studios’ “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”
Disney
Comic books were once a refuge from homework. Now, to maintain up with the whole lot happening in Disney’s MCU and Sony’s Spider-Verse, which can be connected to the MCU, it is advisable to have watched just about the whole lot that got here before to get in control. That is dozens of flicks and shows, going back to the unique Robert Downey Jr. “Iron Man.”
“The Flash,” meanwhile, may be probably the most intense comic book movie pop quiz, though DC’s cinematic universe has been all over. It’s jam-packed with cameos (some real, some CGI-generated) from past DC movies and shows, going all the way in which back to George Reeves’ black-and-white Superman.
But with a purpose to understand all of the gags, you’ve gotten to be really into these things. Unless you are an enormous fan of “Clerks” director Kevin Smith – sufficiently big of a fan to have watched his standup specials, that’s – a “Flash” sequence involving a Nicolas Cage version of Superman fighting a large spider may be lost on you. The movie’s punchline, involving George Clooney returning to the role of Bruce Wayne 26 years after the badly received “Batman and Robin,” is clearly geared toward Gen-Xers and older Millennials, not today’s younger audiences.
Even the MCU model has tripped up at times. Disney CEO Bob Iger himself has suggested that the studio was going to the well too often with certain characters, after the fourth Thor film and third Ant-Man installment underwhelmed on the box office. That needs to be one other warning sign for DC Studios.
For his part, DC’s Gunn recently acknowledged that there are “too many” superhero movies and shows. If anyone can give you a creative technique to change course, it’s him.
After working with schlock factory Troma Movies early on, Gunn built a sturdy Hollywood profession as a author and director, alternating between R-rated flicks like “Slither” and stuff for general audiences, like his Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel and Disney. The third entry in that series snapped the MCU out of its mini funk. It’s to date the second-highest-grossing movie of 2023, behind Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”
And he already has a pair DC works on his resume: the 2020 movie “The Suicide Squad” and its 2022 companion series, “Peacemaker,” each of which won wide acclaim.
Gunn is writing and directing “Superman: Legacy,” due in 2025. It’s intended to usher in the brand new DC shared universe. But there’s still time for him to reconsider his approach and let the Man of Steel – and all the opposite DC heroes – be super on their very own.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of Universal and CNBC.
