ETA: I would also like to interject something here. I'm assuming Adams will continue to be in future JLA films. And, of course, Bruce is on Gotham.
And yet, Arrow will no longer be able to use Slade. What exactly are the rules, again?
I think they tend to allow the use of different
versions of the same character, e.g. a younger version of the character before they had the role and relationships we know, because then there isn't direct competition or the potential for confusion or whatever. As long as it's changed enough that nobody's likely to mistake one for the other, then they seem to be okay with it.
See, to me, Clark's relationship with Lois is utterly central to the character, and at least (read: more) important/interesting than the super-smackdown of the week.
Wow, I couldn't disagree more. Sure, in the '50s, when Lois had her own comic book, she was explicitly defined as
Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and even her "solo" stories revolved around her downright pathological romantic obsession with Superman. But if you look at the character as she's been defined from at least Margot Kidder onward, a key aspect of Lois's personality is that she was
already a great, world-famous, award-winning reporter long before she ever met Clark Kent. So a large part of Lois Lane's formative journey was made on her own, and that is absolutely a story I'd be interested in seeing -- if only it weren't from the
Gotham people.
♫ Generic, archetypal, po-tay
-to, po-tah
-to, let's call the whole show off. ♬
You entirely missed my point by focusing on the wrong word. The point is, Lois Lane is not a generic reporter, she is an utterly fearless, intrepid daredevil reporter. What she's an archetype of is not ordinary reporters, but that specific fictional (and occasionally real) category of exceptionally adventurous action-heroine reporters. Lois Lane is to reporters what Indiana Jones is to archaeologists. So she absolutely could hold her own as a series lead in a way that a generic reporter could not.
I mean, heck, she shouldn't be limiting herself to Metropolis investigating a large-scale version of cousin Chloe's Wall of Weird. She should be having globetrotting adventures, confronting dictators and exposing international criminal conspiracies and discovering lost cities and braving erupting volcanoes and so forth. And Lex should be the secret mastermind behind at least half of those conspiracies and disasters, with Lois gradually putting together the pieces that point in his direction.
