They are going ahead with a Justice League movie

[JD]

^I didn't realize he tried to write a Superman movie. Make me wonder if this isn't just frustration speaking.
As for what he actually says, I have to disagree. I don't see where any of the DC characters abilities are really that much worse than the Marvel characters. Hell, one of the next movies has a talking raccoon and a sentient tree among it's cast members. We've gotten plenty of adaptations over the last few years that have shown that the characters still work fine today. I know they've been mostly animated, but I think the things he says were true, then no versions of the characters would be popular today.

[hyzmarca]

JD wrote:

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^I didn't realize he tried to write a Superman movie. Make me wonder if this isn't just frustration speaking.
As for what he actually says, I have to disagree. I don't see where any of the DC characters abilities are really that much worse than the Marvel characters. Hell, one of the next movies has a talking raccoon and a sentient tree among it's cast members. We've gotten plenty of adaptations over the last few years that have shown that the characters still work fine today. I know they've been mostly animated, but I think the things he says were true, then no versions of the characters would be popular today.

The difficulty in writing DC characters is not that they're too goofy, but that they're too strong.

Superman's power is to do anything that the plot requires, essentially. Writer are fond of pulling new powers out of their assess. But even if you limit him to the basics of flight super-speed, super-strength, and invulnerability, you can't challenge him. Even the Richerd Donnor movies required that he be a dumbass in order to provide a suitable challenge.

Green Lantern can literally do anything, limited only by his willpower and imagination. Creating a villain to fight that is not easy, as we saw.

The Flash's abilities actually make him more powerful than Superman. While he lacks flight, he's capable of running at lightspeed, producing infinite energy. Punching someone at full speed would release enough energy to destroy the earth several times over. With the exception of the several evil Flashes, there's nothing that can stand against him even before you get his weird speed-manipulating powers into it.

Wonder Woman is generally depicted as Superman with boobs these days and faces the same problems.

And the Martian Manhunter is Superman with shapeshifting and telepathy, which makes him even worse.

[Christopher]

hyzmarca wrote:

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The difficulty in writing DC characters is not that they're too goofy, but that they're too strong.

Superman's power is to do anything that the plot requires, essentially. Writer are fond of pulling new powers out of their assess. But even if you limit him to the basics of flight super-speed, super-strength, and invulnerability, you can't challenge him.

Thor has the power of a god. The Hulk has no upper limit on his physical strength.

Green Lantern can literally do anything, limited only by his willpower and imagination.

Much the same is true of Dr. Strange.

When it comes to superpowers and basic character types, DC and Marvel have been drawing from pretty much the same well for decades. There's not that great a distinction in that respect. The key difference is in the personalities. Marvel characters -- at least in the Stan Lee era -- tend to have more human fallibility, more personal hangups, more vulnerabilities built into their natures. Captain America is the ultimate clean-cut hero, but he's a man out of time struggling to adjust. The Hulk has unlimited power but no control, making him potentially as much villain as hero. Iron Man has unlimited technology, but would die without it. The X-Men can save the world, but that world finds their very existence threatening or intolerable. And so on. What makes Marvel's characters distinct from DC's is that their Achilles heels aren't a radioactive rock or a particular color of the spectrum, but are either personal hangups or intrinsic downsides of the very things that make them heroes.

So it's not about how strong the characters are or what their powers are like. It's about how they're portrayed as people, how fallible and relatable they are. No matter how much power they have, the key is to find a way to challenge them on a personal level, an emotional level.

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Back to the drawing board??

[Admiral_Young]

Millar never wrote a Superman film script...he did pitch or supposedly pitch a multiple film saga. I don't think anyone knows if he actually officially pitched this to Warner Brothers or it's what he would have done if he had been given the chance. He's talked about this a couple of times.

Keep in mind that Millar is famous for hyperbole...and he's working for a rival company as their consultant and spokesperson so take most of his comments with a grain of salt.

[Set Harth]

"Don’t be surprise [sic] if it ducks out of the summer 2015 scrum though (which includes Star Wars and The Avengers 2) and opts for a 2016 release instead. Time is decreasingly on its side."

Heh... if SW gets pushed back to 2016 they're still up against one another...

[Shazam!]

hyzmarca wrote:

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The difficulty in writing DC characters is not that they're too goofy, but that they're too strong.

Yet they've been managing just fine for decades...

I do get what you mean though, which is why I'd like to see a Tower of Babel tyle of JLA movie.

[Gaith]

Kai "the spy" wrote:

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Oh, please. Millar pursued the job of writing Superman movies quite aggressively, and now he didn't get the job, suddenly the character couldn't possibly work for a modern audience.

There's a big difference between wanting to write/do a Superman movie and wanting to write/do a JLA movie, as Christopher Nolan would no doubt be the first to argue. The IGN Movies writers speculated on their February 1 Keepin' it Reel podcast that The Man of Steel was pushed into production in part to help shore up WB's rights to the Superman property. Trouble is, they asked Nolan to oversee it, and Nolan's got no interest in a JLA/DC cinematic universe, so now the JLA project's hosed either way: if Man of Steel succeeds, putting that Superman into a JLA story would be awkward at best, and if it fails, people probably won't be too psyched to see him or yet another Superman in another context.

Flying Spaghetti Monster wrote:

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Back to the drawing board??

Case in point.


... I think hyzmarca also gave a pretty good summary of the JLA's weaknesses above; also, powers-wise, WW and Flash are basically copies of Superman except without heat vision or flight, respectively, and GL is kinda like Superman plus imagination-weapon powers. Apart from Batman and Aquaman (ha!), they're really too much alike in abilities terms.

JD wrote:

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I don't see where any of the DC characters abilities are really that much worse than the Marvel characters. Hell, one of the next movies has a talking raccoon and a sentient tree among it's cast members.

Those aren't abilities.

[Christopher]

Like I said, the abilities don't matter. Fiction is about characters and their interaction. What matters isn't what they can do, it's who they are. If you write a mere mortal protagonist as though they were infallible and flawless, that will be a boring movie. But if you write a godlike protagonist with relatable flaws and doubts and engaging relationships, that can be a splendid movie.

[Shazam!]

Gaith wrote:

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WW and Flash are basically copies of Superman except without heat vision or flight, respectively, and GL is kinda like Superman plus imagination-weapon powers. Apart from Batman and Aquaman (ha!), they're really too much alike in abilities terms.

I know. And The Dirty Dozen? They're all just normal humans. Way too similar to one and other.

[Gaith]

Christopher wrote:

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Like I said, the abilities don't matter. Fiction is about characters and their interaction. What matters isn't what they can do, it's who they are.

Come now; of course abilities matter. There's a reason the X-Men don't all have healing factors and claws as their sole powers; in the superhero genre, a generous variety of abilities is inherently more interesting than the dearth of same. Moreover, "what characters can do" inevitably shapes and defines "who they are". Just ask The Thing, or Nightcrawler.

Obviously, abilities aren't everything, but we're not exactly talking an almost purely intellectually-driven milieu a la The West Wing here.

[Kelthaz]

Flying Spaghetti Monster wrote:

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Back to the drawing board??

Good. I would love to see a Justice League film, but not this half-assed desperate attempt by DC to achieve Marvel's success. Justice League felt more like an Asylum ripoff of The Avengers than an equal.

DC, please, stop rushing and spend some time thinking this through carefully. Do it properly.

[Christopher]

Gaith wrote:

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Come now; of course abilities matter. There's a reason the X-Men don't all have healing factors and claws as their sole powers; in the superhero genre, a generous variety of abilities is inherently more interesting than the dearth of same. Moreover, "what characters can do" inevitably shapes and defines "who they are". Just ask The Thing, or Nightcrawler.

You're taking me too literally. Someone suggested above that the reason DC movies don't work as well as Marvel movies is because of the different types of powers the DC characters have. My point is that this doesn't make sense as an explanation, because, while of course characters' abilities are relevant to the story just like any other character detail, they do not, in and of themselves, determine whether or not a story can be any good. There have been great stories and lousy stories about Superman, and there have been great stories and lousy stories about Spider-Man. It's not as simplistic as "Marvel has better powers than DC and that's why their movies succeed." That is just wrong on so many levels. There's no reason, in principle, why we couldn't have great DC movies and lousy Marvel movies. It's just the luck of the draw that the studio executives currently in charge of making movies based on Marvel characters have had a better handle on how to achieve it than the execs in charge of making movies based on DC characters. Ten or fifteen years from now, the reverse might be true -- we might be celebrating the brilliant work that's being done with Wonder Woman and Flash and the Teen Titans on film and lamenting that the glory days of Marvel films are so far in the past. There are no absolutes here.

[Silvercrest]

Christopher wrote:

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(Although that doesn't explain the epilogue in the cafe in Europe. Don't they have TV in Europe? Surely he'd still have one of the most recognizable faces in the world.)

"Wayne? Sorry, I'm afraid you're mistaken. My name is Christian Bale."

[Captain Craig]

Warners is just teetering on the brink of really screwing this up. This pull back with the current script may be the first sign they may not screw up a JLA movie....maybe.