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What WB/DC should do to compete against Disney/Marvel's MCU?

Reveen said:
Which proves my point, because though Iron Man was b-tier in the public eye, he was still a well known property. Compared to Martian Manhunter, who barely anyone who doesn't read comics would know a thing about despite him being a key member of the Justice League.

Guardians is more of an outlier, considering that it was marketed as a Star Wars-is space story, which doesn't really rely on pure name recognition that superhero movies do.
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No, Martian Manhunter would have had about the same level of Recognition as Iron Man pre-MCU
 
Reveen said:
Which proves my point, because though Iron Man was b-tier in the public eye, he was still a well known property. Compared to Martian Manhunter, who barely anyone who doesn't read comics would know a thing about despite him being a key member of the Justice League.

Guardians is more of an outlier, considering that it was marketed as a Star Wars-is space story, which doesn't really rely on pure name recognition that superhero movies do.
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I don't think most people knew that Ant Man was a thing before they made him a thing.
 
I don't have much to say except that Starro should have been the bad guy in Justice League.



- "Evil Psychic Starfish" is far more memorable than whatever Steppenwolf was.
- He's a surprisingly good balance between comicbook camp and alien, unknowable horror.
- No one's done a Body Snatchers plot in a superhero movie yet.
- Easy excuse to set up fight scenes among the heroes.
- There's usually not much to him character-wise, so you can just treat him as a pure threat and keep the character focus on the good guys. Though if you're not comfortable with that, you can just follow Scott Snyder's example and turn him into a stand-in for Bill Cipher. Which was admittedly not the most original idea but damn if it didn't work.
 
Vinegrape said:
- There's usually not much to him character-wise, so you can just treat him as a pure threat and keep the character focus on the good guys. Though if you're not comfortable with that, you can just follow Scott Snyder's example and turn him into a stand-in for Bill Cipher. Which was admittedly not the most original idea but damn if it didn't work.
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Wait what?

Ok yeah I can't not read that in a Bill Cipher voice.
 
Vinegrape said:
I don't have much to say except that Starro should have been the bad guy in Justice League.



- "Evil Psychic Starfish" is far more memorable than whatever Steppenwolf was.
- He's a surprisingly good balance between comicbook camp and alien, unknowable horror.
- No one's done a Body Snatchers plot in a superhero movie yet.
- Easy excuse to set up fight scenes among the heroes.
- There's usually not much to him character-wise, so you can just treat him as a pure threat and keep the character focus on the good guys. Though if you're not comfortable with that, you can just follow Scott Snyder's example and turn him into a stand-in for Bill Cipher. Which was admittedly not the most original idea but damn if it didn't work.
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Isn't that just Dark Nebula? :p
 
Does it even matter if a character is A-tier or B-tier or O-tier or whatever? Or is it more important that you can tell an interesting story with them, and turn them into interesting characters?

Marvel tried to tell an interesting story with all of it's movies. Iron Man 3 was heavily about PTSD, as well about how terrorism is more about fear than actual impact. Captain America: Winter Soldier was heavily about Cap adapting to a new world while holding onto his own principles, but also had the hardly-subtle theme about demanding total security. Guardians of the Galaxy 1 was in large parts about getting over your childish (male) ego, while 2 dealt even more heavily with growing up and with loss. Doctor Strange ended with a non-violent resolution. Spider-Man was the only one of those actually about a teenager. Black Panther not only dared to be non-subtle with it's afro-futurism, but also had a ton of themese and I just saw it. And all of those are only very condensed anyway, I'm only scratching the surface and leaving a lot out, including whole movies.
But very importantly, it wasn't just about those themes but also gave us characters we care about. All those characters are more than just their archetype.

DC manages that as well - with it's TV shows, none of which feature A-tier characters (Superman shows up in Supergirl occasionally, but only as a guest character). And of course the movies try to go for themes as well, but they tend to be much heavier on the philosophy and obscure symbolism.
But again more importantly - can you really say that the movies make you care about Superman or Batman as characters, as portrayed in that movie? Was there every a moment where you had an emotion because the character had that emotion, where you shared fear or grief or anger? Did it succeed in making you think about these characters as people - can you imagine them interact with others?

I can easily imagine Captain America/Steve Rogers interact with another human being. Any of his fellow superheroes, but I can also imagine him sitting down with my sister and talk about her son, or with my best friend and have her explain computer-stuff to him, or basically anyone else. There's literary a meme about it. I can imagine different scenes with Doctor Strange, Thor, Tony Stark, Black Widow, Gamora, Shuri - basically anyone. Obviously the conversations will go differently each time, but I can imagine them and have some inkling what they'd say.
If I put DCU Superman in any such situation? I wouldn't even know what his first sentence would be.

I'm increasingly left wondering if you can even tell interesting stories and turn Superman and Batman into interesting characters anymore.
Maybe decades of being highly visible in our culture has made them too fixed - all that was there to tell has been told, any movie you could make would feel tired, any character you could portray would at best feel familiar already. The latter would be good, but would it be interesting? Would it draw in new audiences? Would we care about that character, or would it just be an exension of a cultural archetype so taht we ultimately don't manage to sufficiently care about this incarnation?

Or maybe the DCU is just that shit.
 
Apparently Steppenwolf was supposed to have a far more alien design before they scrapped his model and remade him from the ground up to be more human. It wouldn't have saved him from being a weird kind of perverted generic doomsday villain who rambles on about his momma without aim or point, but it does explain why his CGI is so awful; it was all super rushed in response to criticisms about Doomsday's appearance. Or him being incredibly weak and lame given how Superman dumpstered him in seconds and his army was never established to actually be a threat to any of the heroes; at least Loki's Chitauri could K.O the Hulk. He's a weird rambly uncle who wants to hit on mother and doesn't really get to do anything to establish he's a threat to anyone.

The DCEU seems to be a creative mess.

But no seriously, I can't let this go, Steppenwolf is such a catastrophically awful villain.
 
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I mean. Steppenwolfe is a Literally Who whose most notable achievement was getting punked by Yung Darkseid and getting the shit slapped out of him by Izaya the Highfather in a flashback issue of Kirby's OG New Gods. That's it! The most interesting thing about the dude is his jaunty hat.

They picked a New God right off the bat, stripped him of all aesthetic and textual relation to the Fourth World stuff, gave him an entirely different personality and made him walk out of fucking Dragon Age.

What I wouldn't give to find out what the hell happened with that. Like, who the fuck picked Steppenwolf? WHY? Did they just sell it as "we can use him to bring in Thanos Bit Better later" and that was all the thought it got?

The only way anyone thinks of STOPPENWOLF is when they think about Darkseid and if they say otherwise they are lying through their teeth. He's not a D-Lister. Black Bolt is a fucking D-Lister. He's not a anything. I genuinely cannot remember another comic appearance of the dude outside of his debut.

God Justice League was a strange film.
 
Rook said:
I mean. Steppenwolfe is a Literally Who whose most notable achievement was getting punked by Yung Darkseid and getting the shit slapped out of him by Izaya the Highfather in a flashback issue of Kirby's OG New Gods. That's it! The most interesting thing about the dude is his jaunty hat.

They picked a New God right off the bat, stripped him of all aesthetic and textual relation to the Fourth World stuff, gave him an entirely different personality and made him walk out of fucking Dragon Age.

What I wouldn't give to find out what the hell happened with that. Like, who the fuck picked Steppenwolf? WHY? Did they just sell it as "we can use him to bring in Thanos Bit Better later" and that was all the thought it got?

The only way anyone thinks of STOPPENWOLF is when they think about Darkseid and if they say otherwise they are lying through their teeth. He's not a D-Lister. Black Bolt is a fucking D-Lister. He's not a anything. I genuinely cannot remember another comic appearance of the dude outside of his debut.

God Justice League was a strange film.
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His redesign to have a big horned helmet almost makes me think that they wanted to make him a Loki wannabe. He apparently also wanted to free his mother from the Earth, which would make his bizarre meandering monologues about his mom make more sense. But one of the biggest issues with him is that he kind of...doesn't really interact with any of the heroes besides fighting them. He just rambles at them without a real dialogue.
 
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Mental Omega said:
His redesign to have a big horned helmet almost makes me think that they wanted to make him a Loki wannabe. He apparently also wanted to free his mother from the Earth, which would make his bizarre meandering monologues about his mom make more sense. But one of the biggest issues with him is that he kind of...doesn't really interact with any of the heroes besides fighting them. He just rambles at them without a real dialogue.
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Look. Look at this motherfucker.

Boom. Just give the man his pointy hat and dog cavalry and he has an actual personality!

I FIXED THE DCEU YOU GUYS
 
Rook said:
Look. Look at this motherfucker.

Boom. Just give the man his pointy hat and dog cavalry and he has an actual personality!

I FIXED THE DCEU YOU GUYS
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That was something else weird about justice league. There were several kinds of Chitauri in avengers; some with more golden helmets, some with arm cannons, some with those skinny guns, some on the skiffs, and the space whales.

Justice league had nothing but bog standard Parademons for the entire movie.
 
The MCU also included movies about the Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, and frigging Ant-Man.
Like, how many people who didn't read a bunch of Marvel comics or dug into TVTropes or whatnot to research the MCU even had any idea who those people were?

In this day and age, how much do you gain out of your audience already being super-familiar with a character?
They can get the basic idea of a trailer they can see whenever they want on youtube, and off one-page articles you can have plastered all over the fan-sites. If any wants more information, they can dig up whole fan-written libraries full of them. These movies are talked about, and people have been exposed to superhero tropes so much that even if you don't watch a trailer it's easy to grasp what's going on. So you certainly don't need it for basic familiarity - you can count on viewers having that once the movie has started.

So, is it any good for marketing? Sure, if the last couple of movies hadn't existed, people would probably be more interested in a Superman or Batman movie than in an Oracle movie or a Zatanna movie.
But the previous movies do exist. I've already asked whether you can even tell any interesting new stories about those characters, positing that they're simply too fixed to do much with them. It'd be hard to come up with a way to sell those other than "Superman, except this time it's good, trust us" - and would people really trust them?

So no, I don't think name recognition and using A-tier characters matters that much as much anymore. They're an asset, but not a necessity. And the DCU has managed to turn that asset into a liability where Batman and Superman are concerned, in my opinion at least.
 
Serafina said:
Like, how many people who didn't read a bunch of Marvel comics or dug into TVTropes or whatnot to research the MCU even had any idea who those people were?
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Doctor Strange was in some episodes of the Spiderman cartoon in the '90s. It's more exposure than Ant-man or the Guardians ever got.
 
Flare said:
Doctor Strange was in some episodes of the Spiderman cartoon in the '90s. It's more exposure than Ant-man or the Guardians ever got.
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Ant-Man was the leader in the Avengers cartoon. Not the Earth's Mightiest Heroes, though. This one. Not sure if that even counts as a positive, though, since it literally had only nineteen episodes. As for the Guardians, they did appear in the Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon. For one episode. Pretty sure you can't count that as exposure, too.

In short... shit, you right.
 
Warner Bros. Decides The Best Business Plan For DC's Future Is To Make Good Movies

No, no this is not a Onion headline.

Article:
In a new interview with EW, Warner Bros. film chairman Toby Emmerich sounds hopeful that Aqauman will be the start of a new and improved DCEU. Emmerich's secret formula to improving the franchise? Make better movies. "I think the good movies work better," Emmerich says. "Somebody once said the best business strategy in motion pictures in quality. And I think in a world of Rotten Tomatoes and social media, what's been proven the better the movie — particularly in the superhero genre — the better it performs. You can't hide the bacon anymore."

And just how will the DCEU strive to make better films? According to Emmerich, the secret lies in tapping into the zeitgeist of the moment, and hopefully, Aquaman will do just that:

"I would say no matter what, the better the movie is the more advantage it is. Now when you're talking about art, I do believe that it's tough to judge art at the moment when its presented to the world….But I would say there are movies that are right for their time, that an audience is ready for, that's in sync with the zeitgeist, and I think you need a movie whose quality is recognized at the moment of release so it's in touch with the culture of the moment. We're at a unique moment around the planet and certain types of movies are working better than others at this moment of time. And I do think Aquaman will sync up with the global culture zeitgeist of what's happening right now. "

Emmerich goes on to say that while Aquaman has "connective tissue " to previous DC films, it will also stand on its own, "just like how [director Patty Jenkins] brought her own sensibility to Wonder Woman — yet it was very connected [to Justice League] — that movie was very much a Patty Jenkins movie this is very much a James Wan movie."
 
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