Summary
- The DCEU has faced numerous challenges in recent years, from a lack of interest to numerous controversies.
- The Batman stood out as a success due to its departure from the usual superhero formula, focusing on the character’s detective roots and embracing a dark and gritty tone.
- According to former DC director David Ayer, the key to fixing the franchise is to allow filmmakers to have creative freedom and not operate from a place of fear, sticking to DC’s brand of dark, intense, and thoughtful storytelling.
The 2022 and 2023 were nothing short of a disaster for the outgoing DCEU franchise ahead of the “soft” reboot by James Gunn and Peter Safran in the coming years. What exactly went wrong is still a subject that is up for debate among fans, with given reasons ranging from a general lack of interest in a disjointed franchise to the controversies of Henry Cavill’s Superman departure and Ezra Miller’s numerous arrests. However, one former DC director believes there is something else categorically wrong with the franchise, and it is something that can be easily solved.
In the last few years, one of WBD’s biggest superhero successes has been The Batman, a complete abandonment of the usual tech-heavy, fantastical elements of the comic book hero’s on-screen appearances, which took him back to his detective roots in a dark and gritty grounded story. While not for everyone, The Batman proved more successful at the domestic box office than the likes of Batman vs Superman, and its domestic total of just over $360 million was more than the worldwide total of any DC released in the last year (and only $30 million short of Black Adam’s total gross.)
The main difference with The Batman is that the movie came from Matt Reeves’ vision, and seemed to be made without much studio interference. For Suicide Squad director David Ayer, this is how it should be for all DC movies, and he believes it would be a simple solution to the franchise’s woes. IN a post on X, Ayer responded to a question by The Hollywood Reporter asking “Where have all the DC fans gone?”, to which he replied:
“Easy solve. Let film makers have their vision. Don’t operate from fear. Be daring. Look at what worked. Don’t chase the market. DC has always had the best characters in publishing. Dark intense and thoughtful is the brand.”
Is The DCU Trying to be the MCU?
From an outside perspective, Warner Bros. DC extended universe has always been attempting to play catch-up in the superhero shared universe stakes, and possibly worrying too much about getting really big, really fast to notice that this was causing more problems than solving them. Zack Snyder’s original plan for the DC franchise was a short sharp series of movies that would tell an interconnected story, but was never intended to have the scope or scale of Marvel’s behemoth.
In creating the “extended” universe, but at the same time losing Snyder, the following years have fallen to a series of moderate hits and many misses, both in terms of critical appraisal and box office success. Movies such as The Flash, which went through multiple directors/writers and made many changes due to the behind-the-scenes upheaval of the franchise, have clearly suffered from outside influences, which as Ayer suggests is not something that is ever going to end well. Whether the future franchise, under the guidance of Gunn and Safran can manage to deliver a more successful DCU is something that we are a few years away from finding out. In many ways, though, it certainly cannot do much worse.
