With Shazam 2 and The Flash officially failures, the last gasp of the DC Cinematic Universe or DCEU is Aquaman 2. If it bombs like the other two then it is entirely, completely over for the DCEU. So, who's to blame for the failure?
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Culprit #1 Zack Snyder
The most obvious scapegoat is Zack Snyder. His grim and gritty Man of Steel started the DCEU and set the tone for BvS and Justice League and Wonder Woman to a lesser extent. It's easy to say that's where it all went wrong because the tone was different from Marvel movies--or that's how it was perceived. Despite that by 2016, Marvel movies weren't all happy and "fun" all the time. I mean Age of Ultron and Civil War are not really "fun" movies. Infinity War and Endgame are just downright grim.
And really, anyone who had watched Snyder's movies except maybe that owl one should have known what to expect. If you wanted "fun" you probably should have hired James Gunn back then. So...
Culprit #2 Studio Execs
You can definitely lay a lot of this at the feet of studio execs for WB/DC. First they hired Snyder, see above. Second, once they had a moderate success in Man of Steel, they got dollar signs in their eyes and thought they could get a piece of that Marvel money. And why not? They had a stable of the world's oldest and most recognizable superheroes. So I guess you can forgive them for thinking, why not us? It makes a lot more sense than some other attempts to make a "cinematic universe" in the 2010s.
But where you can really fault them is the way it was done. Instead of patiently developing characters, they just ham-fistedly jammed a bunch of new characters into a movie. I'm not a Batfleck fan, but at least the way he came into it sorta worked--right up to where they ripped off The Dark Knight Returns duel and then become buddies because their moms have the same name--and Wonder Woman's entrance was amazing. The other cameos though were so obvious and lame--almost as lame as Eisenberg's Luthor.
The end result because of the tone and because they didn't want to wait to develop the universe was a movie full of holes, ham-fisted cameos, and meh VFX. Despite that the movie more or less broke even, it was still pretty much a failure but like bad gamblers, the studio stayed in and tried to win the next hands and really kept in far too long so they wound up getting cleaned out.
Culprit #3 Bad Timing
This can in part be blamed on studio execs. A key part of the problem I think is they didn't even get the first piece of their cinematic universe in place until 2013. That was after "Phase 1" of Marvel's universe. That gave Marvel 5 years of a head start. They also had five years to dictate the narrative and become THE name brand of superhero movies.
While DC's heroes are almost all older than Marvel's (except Captain America is older than some DC heroes), people who don't read comics or know the history of comics might not have even realized it. To a lot of young people, Marvel was the one who basically invented superhero movies. So while DC's heroes came first historically, many people saw their movies as the imitators--and not usually in a positive way.
Culprit #4 Bad Movies/No Movies
As an extension of #3, between 2008 and 2013 the only success DC had were the final two Nolan Batman movies. Green Lantern was ambitious but failed and Jonah Hex was a total disaster. Meanwhile, DC had already fumbled the Superman franchise in 2006 with Superman Returns, which like Green Lantern was ambitious but flawed. Watchmen was a moderate success at best but that was a standalone movie anyway. On various sites you can read about proposed projects that never got off the ground like Justice League Mortal which would have perhaps beget a "cinematic universe" in 2009-2010 but DC could never get its shit together to do it.
If you look at the history of The Flash, it went through numerous writers and directors before getting made into the flop it was. If they'd gotten their crap together sooner, they could have made something to release before the pandemic hit. Really they should have listened to me when I said a Flashpoint movie was a bad idea.
On top of that, they had that stupid "Birds of Prey" movie where after a mediocre opening they tried to change the title to emphasize Harley Quinn's involvement. I'm still not sure why they didn't just call it Harley Quinn from the start since she's way more popular than Birds of Prey ever was. Speaking of, they didn't use Batgirl in that and then basically mulched a whole Batgirl movie to get a tax break.
Culprit #5: The Discovery Merger
If WB hadn't merged with Discovery last year, maybe things would have been different. Maybe James Gunn & Peter Safran wouldn't have been brought in to take over DC's movies. Maybe they wouldn't have announced a new slate of movies rebooting the DCEU. Maybe then Shazam 2 and The Flash would have done better because they wouldn't have seemed like lame duck franchise movies. They certainly wouldn't have made changes to the end of the latter because they knew they weren't going to continue that universe going forward. Maybe they would have been able to keep Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, and Gal Gadot as their "Trinity." Maybe they would have given in to Snyderverse fans again and let him make the rest of his Justice League trilogy.
Or maybe it would have only bought this DCEU a little more time. It might have just been like a gambler hocking a watch or car to stay in another hand before being completely cleaned out.
Culprit #6: Ezra Miller
No matter what, I don't think Shazam 2 was ever going to be a huge hit. Thanks to DC, Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) hasn't been a hugely popular character since the 1950s. The first movie was probably only greenlit because of Geoff Johns's involvement as first the writer of Shazam comics in the "New 52" and later the creative director of the DCEU. Like the Ant-Man franchise it was mostly an afterthought; it was second-string at best. So its failure wasn't really that big of a deal because unlike the Ant-Man franchise, the DCEU wasn't pivoting on it.
That was The Flash. It was the last big attempt to save the DCEU--or this version of it. Basically it was the hail Mary and the ball was in the hands of Ezra Miller as the star of the movie. Buuuut, "their" bad--perhaps even criminal--behavior put everyone from execs to fans in an awkward position.
I don't know about other people, but I don't like canceling anyone. I don't really want to worry about what celebrities are doing in their spare time. I don't read US Weekly or the Enquirer or watch Entertainment Tonight or those other shows. I don't really care. But when this stuff gets out in the general media, then it's hard not to notice and I can either shell out money to support a deranged lunatic asshole or I can stay home and maybe watch the thing later on streaming or Redbox--with a coupon. Which am I more likely to do? Yeah, I'm going to do the easy thing and not go. Even if I'm not actively canceling "them," I'm also not going to go out of my way to support "them" either.
And then it's really awkward trying to promote a movie when you can't have your star doing interviews. Instead you have to have a costar and the director--and they can't really answer the questions people want to know about their costar/star. It becomes the elephant in the room--or on the red carpet.
Things might have worked out better if the movie had been given Blue Beetle's August release because then the SAG strike would have given everyone an excuse not to do publicity and it would have given everyone an excuse if the movie hadn't performed as well. But then hindsight is 20/20, right?
If Miller hadn't gotten "themself?" in trouble, it's no guarantee the movie would have been a big hit, but it probably would have done better. I mean the last thing DC needed with all its other problems was more negative press.
Culprit #7: Squandering Success
While its movie universe has been a mess with only pockets of success--mostly Batman--they had some success for a while with the "Arrowverse" on TV and put together a string of decent animated movies. But they never parleyed this into any success with live action movies.
The animated universe wouldn't necessarily have transferred to live action, but maybe they should have brought in some of the writers and producers from that; they seemed to have a much better idea what they were doing.
The "Arrowverse," DC made it clear right away that TV was TV and film was film when before The Flash had even aired they already announced Ezra Miller as the movie Flash. How's that working out for you? Would a Grant Gustin Flash movie have done better? Could it have done worse? I mean, really, could it?
Mostly I think there was this stodgy old belief that TV actors aren't as good as movie actors. That is often the case but the 90s saw George Clooney, Jim Carrey, and Jennifer Aniston become big stars while starting on TV. Tom Hanks started on TV in that cross-dressing show. Julianne Moore started on a soap opera. All those SNL alums like Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and of course Bill Murray. I mean, come on, it's pretty obvious that just because someone is on TV doesn't mean they can 't be in movies.
Cross-pollinating TV and movies might have given DC an edge over Marvel, which until 2013 was only focused on movies and even then their shows like Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage were kept separate from the main part of the precious MCU. It wasn't until 2020 that Marvel began integrating TV with movies. DC had a chance to do that first but didn't.
Besides the "Arrowverse" they also added a batch of TV shows for DC Universe/HBO Max like Titans, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, and Stargirl--the latter two aired on the CW but weren't part of the "Arrowverse." But again none of those crossed over with the movies or even the Arrowverse. Two chances to integrate movies and TV and they blew it both times!
Those are just some potential culprits. I'm sure it's not all of them. What would you add to the list?
2 comments:
I think the main problem is the studio had no plan. Disney went in with a plan for the Marvel movies to tie together while Warner Brothers had no plan and were rather scatter-shot with the movies. Constant reboots didn't help and I think the last two movies (which were both really good) failed because fans knew Gunn was coming in and scrapping everything to start over. It also doesn't help that there were two universes - Batman's and The Dark Knight's. Nolan was spot-on with his Dark Knight trilogy, but that fit that universe. Not so much with Snyder and the Batman world where there are superheroes with powers. (Although I still think his four hour Justice League is the best superhero film ever.) And ultimately, I think we are seeing superhero burnout as the last couple Marvel films didn't score big either. And to a degree, with the exception of last year's Maverick (which still boggles my mind as there were so many flaws in that average film), The Batman, and to a degree Avatar II, people just aren't going to the theater like they were before the pandemic.
Number Eight...the "fans". Every time a DC movie was announced, people on the internet complained about the casting, the writers, the directors, the costume artists, the music scoring...all before the movie ever even came out. There were certain groups who constantly predicted doom and gloom and spouted the same tired old lines like "it's too dark". There were the stuck up Marvel fanboys who couldn't help themselves bragging their movies were better and fueling the flames. There were the "fans" of DC stuff who expected the movies to be shot-for-shot remakes of the comic book stories they had read and then when the movie only borrowed ideas from those stories, they wailed and cried.
During the height of the MCU, even skeptical Marvel fans took a "wait and see" attitude toward some of the more questionable films, like Guardians or Antman, yet DC people would bad-mouth the films from the jump. It's never going to work out when your own fanbase is fighting against itself and another fanbase. No one ever seemed to just want to be entertained, they wanted cinematic masterpieces that directly mimicked the comic books...or at least that's what some wanted. Some would never have been content no matter what was made.
I tend to think that the clear lack of a direction in making the movies and trying to shoe-horn a cinematic universe into existence the way they did was a huge contributing factor, but having a toxic fanbase at war with itself over every decision could never lead to success. Marvel captured lightning in a bottle with "Iron Man" and parlayed that into billions of dollars over the years and that's largely due to fan support...fan support DC lacked and failed to cultivate on any level.
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