The DC Universe Deserves Better than the Marvel Formula

Over the last week, a lot of industry insiders and prognosticators have said it is. We even noted this when news of Batgirl’s cancellation first broke. From the perspective of new Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, it makes perfect nickel and dime sense to want to clean house and tear down the DCEU as we know it. If your goal is to have a brand that audiences show up for, year in and year out, regardless of their familiarity with the current product’s main character or the filmmakers behind it, following the model that can turn a former B-lister like Doctor Strange into a franchise worth $954 million per entry has a lot of appeal. Certainly more so than the model that created a situation wherein three different actors are playing Batman at the same time, allowing online fans to divide into just as many factions as they snipe at each other about why their Caped Crusader is better than yours.

Yet the vast majority of the folks speculating, and perhaps even fantasizing, about WBD’s new purported 10-year plan to build a shared cinematic universe—aka the altar upon which Batgirl was sacrificed—do not actually have any stake in the company, whether as employees, executives, or shareholders. Most of them just want good movies about their favorite superhero characters. To which I ask: Is the shared universe model the best avenue for truly good superhero movies?

In terms of making profit for parent companies and a board of directors, Marvel Studios’ streamlined conveyor belt remains the gold standard. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness crossed $950 million this past summer and likely could’ve hit the arbitrary $1 billion threshold had Disney elected to not put it on Disney+ within 45 days of its theatrical debut. Meanwhile Thor: Love and Thunder has crossed $700 million. Both movies are riding high despite decidedly mixed reactions from fans. Each film received a “B+” CinemaScore from audiences polled by what’s considered to be the industry standard. And in terms of generating positive word-of-mouth, a B+ is viewed as anemic. This was borne out as accurate by how both films dropped in their second weekends by 67 percent and 67.7 percent, respectively.

As with their middling Rotten Tomatoes scores (74 percent and 65 percent, respectively), the general perception appears ambivalent. They’re still hits, but the brand loyalty Marvel has cultivated has not marked Marvel’s “Phase Four” to be any stronger when one considers the also muted receptions for Eternals, Black Widow, and most of the Disney+ shows not named WandaVision or Loki. In fact, if not for the glowing enthusiasm around Spider-Man: No Way Home, one might suggest Phase Four has been a bit of a shrug. Yet to the rest of the industry, that “meh” looks like a pot of gold.

Once upon a time, Warner Bros. (under different management) also attempted to chase the Marvel formula like Universal did with the Dark Universe, and Fox did when they tried to tie Fan4stic into the X-Men movies. For WB, those brief hectic years are now described by fans to be “the SnyderVerse.” The term acts like a partition around a an exclusive collection of somber, brooding, and highly interconnected DCEU films: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad (2016), and Justice League. Five years after that last film crashed and burned with both critics and audiences, some revisionist fans have reframed this era as a lost Camelot for superhero movies. 

But in truth, a major reason director Zack Snyder was replaced on Justice League, and why the buzz on that movie was so bad even before it was butchered in studio-mandated reshoots, is because of how grim the reception was to movies like Snyder’s BvS and David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Not unlike Universal cramming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into The Mummy, BvS was an ungainly and chaotic studio product that attempted to be a sequel to Snyder’s Man of Steel, a gloomy Batman reboot with actor Ben Affleck, a slapdash “Death of Superman” adaptation, and a rushed bridge to Justice League and (presumably) Marvel money.