But let's be honest, if they decide to go through with Aquaman and Flash movies, does anyone honestly expect them to be anything but on the light side? A serious Barry Allen? I don't think so.
There have certainly been times when Aquaman was a very serious and intense character. This is a guy whose baby was murdered and who once cut off his own hand to escape a deathtrap and replaced it with a hook.
But live-action Superman has always been kind of serious, even as far back as the Reeves series. The first two Reeve films, the good parts of L&C, Smallville, Superman Returns, and even bits of Superboy all had a serious slant to them. I don't see MoS as being any different.
I wouldn't say that. The George Reeves series started out fairly serious, but got much lighter in later seasons. The first two Reeve films had plenty of humor; Clark Kent was played almost entirely as a slapstick character, the
Daily Planet scenes were pure screwball comedy, Lois's awkward interplay with Superman was loaded with comedic lines, the public's reactions to Superman on his first patrol were mostly comical, and Lex, Otis, and Eve were very farcical characters. And
Lois & Clark was designed specifically as a romantic
comedy from the word go.
As far as Batman being dark, Nolan had nothing to do with that. The Dark Knight is ... well ... dark. He's been that way for most of his life (Adam West not withstanding). Both Burton films were plenty dark--and so was Forever, for the most part. B&R was just bad.
Again, it seems you're remembering selectively. Batman was a dark, pulpy vigilante in his first
year, but as soon as Robin was introduced in 1940, the stories started to get lighter in tone -- still playing it basically straight, but with a lot more wisecracking and fun. And in the '50s, once the Comics Code kicked in and put the kibosh on violence, the comics took a much more overt turn toward comedic, farcical situations. The Adam West sitcom was actually a fairly literal translation of what the comics had actually been like for the previous decade or so, and if anything they
toned down the absurdity, because they didn't have Bat-Mite, stories about Batman putting on strange costume variants or being turned into a baby, or stories about Superman and Batman playing elaborate pranks on each other or competing for Lois Lane's affections.
Batman didn't start to get serious again until the '70s, and even then there was still plenty of lightness and silliness in the stories, especially in Bob Haney's
The Brave and the Bold (the comic that brought us the classic
"The Batman digs this day" moment). He didn't get
ultra-serious until
The Dark Knight Returns came along, and people forget that that was meant as a satirical deconstruction, taking the character to an absurdly dark extreme far removed from how he was actually written at the time. Unfortunately, almost everyone since then has mistaken that deliberately extreme alternative take as the model for how Batman "should" be written by default. And heck, even TDKR was full of biting humor and satire, like the grotesque, senile caricature of President Reagan or the various cynical and clueless vox pops and vacuous newsreaders.
As for the Burton films, they're only dark relative to the Adam West series. They're actually quite ludicrously comical in a lot of ways, just as campy in their own right as the West series, just with darker scenery and more violence. I mean, the big climactic threat in the second movie was
penguins with miniature rocket launchers strapped to their backs. That's more ridiculous than anything Burgess Meredith ever pulled. And
Batman Forever was full of neon and bright colors and lame comedy and flashy scenery -- I'd hardly call it dark except in the sense that it mostly took place at night.
