If there was one major misstep that Warner Bros. and DC made when it came to making their own universe of movies, it was trying to copy the competitor. By the time 2012 rolled around, and Marvel just changed movies as we knew it, one of the conversations you knew was happening the Monday after at Warner Bros. and DC was how they could do the same thing. They tried to do that and announced a huge slate of movies and two Justice League team-ups in about half the time that Marvel had spent building up their universe. It seemed like a good idea until things completely fell apart with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. By then, it was too late to go back on Justice League for anyone involved, including Zack Snyder, who was more or less overseeing the entire thing. The DCEU needed to course-correct, and they needed to do it fast. Snyder was recently on TheFilmJunkee (via ScreenRant) and spoke about how his movies weren't ever going to fit into the Marvel mold that everyone wanted.
"Well frankly, I just love that they decided to kind of embrace their personality… I think that there was always this sort of criticism and or the middle step. What's the middle step? Ya know, trying to be like Marvel? Trying to do your own thing? Like, what are you going to do? But I think now, it's kind of locked in to this very specific trajectory where, I think and I hope, the idea is that it's filmmaker first… Which is basically what the multiverse allows for, filmmaker first and then, here's the characters, bringing the characters together."
"Even when I was doing Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Justice League, there were DC animated films that had nothing to do with what we were doing, and there were DC TV shows that had nothing to do with what we were doing, and there was no way to seam those up without alienating a giant fandom by saying 'Your Flash doesn't count' or 'Your animated show doesn't mean anything.'"
Zack Snyder's Justice Leauge graphic. Credit: HBO Max
"I think that Marvel, they've built [their universe] over a long period of time, so by the time they got to their later movies, everything had kinda locked in, and it was all sort of moving in the same direction. But that was just never going to happen [with DC] because the DC TV shows were so popular and because their animated shows were so popular. I mean that was a success that they had. And [Christopher Nolan's] movies sort of had another tone and other universe. So there was no way that those things were going to ever like 'OK, we're going to say those things don't exist now, and it's this.' And I think there was that thinking for a while, but I'm glad that it kind of settled into a much more diverse [approach]."
The truth is that DC and Warner Bros. are better off now, just letting everyone make their movies and not worrying about how it all fits together than they were trying to do their version of the MCU in half of the time. It wasn't ever going to work out, and it sounds like Snyder was dubious from day one if it ever would. As someone who didn't like Joker, I did appreciate what that movie was doing and how it just went for it without a care in the world for how it would fit into a larger Batman universe.
DC and Warner Bros. seem to be really embracing the idea of the multiverse and even, finally, let their TV shows and movies crossover with the Crisis on Infinite Earths special. So now we can have Matt Reeves'sThe Batman and a different version of The Suicide Squad, and the explanation is "it's a different universe." That is the right way of approaching this entire thing, and it's going to be interesting to see if anything spins-off from Zack Snyder's Justice League, which is set to stream on HBO Max next year.
Kaitlyn is the Editor-in-Chief at Bleeding Cool. She loves movies, television, and comics. She's a member of the UFCA and the GALECA. Feminist. Writer. Nerd. Follow her on twitter @katiesmovies and @safaiagem on instagram. She's also a co-host at The Nerd Dome Podcast. Listen to it at http://www.nerddomepodcast.com
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