A lot of good Batman comics are also pretty grim and cynical-and are also as much or more about the villains.
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
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A lot of good Batman comics are also pretty grim and cynical-and are also as much or more about the villains.
The DCEU movies have been using DC's big gun characters while the MCU starter films weren't. And the DCEU movies cost more to make than the MCU ones. So taking that into consideration, the DCEU films aren't doing that much better,
The Hulk is one of the flagship characters of Marvel and had been even before the Bixby/Ferrigno TV series made the character a permanent household name.
Captain America was not some pop culture newbie, either. Even beyond his enormous popularity during the WW2 period (which included a 15-chapter serial), years later (in the so-named Silver Age of comics), he reappeared in animation (1966), and was heavily merchandised (to the general public) ever since. Further, he was once significant enough to lead to the 1979 TV movie, which performed well so it earned a sequel follow-up. Of course, everyone knows that in the wake of Burton's Batman, Captain America was produced as a movie in 1990, with studios keeping interested eyes on the character in the years before the existence of a Marvel Studios.
Only Thor and Iron Man were not as well known, but Marvel did not dig into the D-list toybox when searching for characters to adapt. In other words, they did not start off with Devil Dinosaur, Rawhide Kid, Human Fly and Whizzer movies.
Warner Bros. has made the mistake of overreacting to the negative critical response to Batman vs Superman and Justice League and coming to the conclusion that they have to make movies that are exactly like the MCU in order for said movies to be successful. What they ought to have done was 'stayed the course' and stuck to their original game plan instead of 'up-ending the tea table' and validating the perception that the DCEU has been a failure in comparison to the MCU, but we are where we are and there's unfortunately no going backwards.
No they're not. They tried to make an MCU type of universe with Batman VS Superman and Justice League. They tried to insert post credits like MCU(Superman vs Flash) (Amanda and Bruce Wayne)
Then they realized they overstepped their bounds and are changing course for individual non connected movies
https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/1045551-warner-bros-kevin-tsujihara
As you can see from "Joker" It's not the beginnings of Jared Leto's Joker.
So I fail to see how it's becoming like MCU when everything will it's own beast.
One dark
One light
One adventurous
One epic
MCU is more or less the same thing churned out by a money making machine.
It's not controversial. It's not overly offense. It's just playing it safe.
Sure they might toss words around like "Political thriller" for Winter Soldier but it's still the same MCU type of movie
Not really. There are comics about the Batman villains, but its not the same thing as having the villains preempt a Batman movie. Also, I've never read a comic with, for example, Penguin vomiting ooze and making weird sex jokes.
I mean, as films the first 6 MCU films are generally 100 times better then the DCEU films (although I'd put Wonder Woman up there with any of the Phase 1 films except Avengers), and if the DCEU films did better financially its because they came out in the current superhero film boom, while the MCU really started the massive superhero film interest (stuff like X-Men and Spider-Man came first, but the MCU made it really big).
In what reality should DC have stuck to their gameplan? Their "gameplan" was to go all with Zack Snyder's grimdark shit, and outside of Wonder Woman, which mostly avoided Snyder's influence, the films were only getting worse and generally under performing. The DCEU was critically a failure, and considering how much money movies like BvS and Justice League should have made, they certainly failed financially in the sense of missing out on a lot of profit. Aquaman proved that changing the gameplan was a good idea, and the only reason anyone gives a crap about movies like The Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey is because they're not supposed to be like the movies that the DEU gameplan was trying to make.
Not to mention movies automatically make more money (box office, not necessarily profit) today than they did 10 years ago because of the proliferation of 3d and IMAX.
Captain America was just well-known enough in pop culture to be the perpetual butt of the joke. And the Hulk (unquestionably the most well known character available to Marvel Studios at the time) was still a smalltime name that hadn't been relevant since the 80s AND was coming straight off of a massive flop that involved giant green poodles.
By comparison, Batman and Superman have been basically synonymous with the entire idea of 'superheroes' for decades. The only character Marvel comics ever had who achieved that level of fame is Spider-man, yet DC despite having 2 of them in the same movie(s) - plus the hyped first movie appearances of the most famous female superhero in existence - still only barely outperformed the solo movies of a character literally no one outside of comics fans had even heard of prior to 2008 (Iron Man).
Either movies work, or they do not, no matter the period of release, hence the reason Burton's Batman (1989) was a major hit, yet one year later, Dick Tracy was a lukewarm, forgettable film, the opposite of what Disney invested / expected, and it simply was not as appealing as Batman, despite the film being helmed by / starring a then-still relevant actor and loaded with big names for nearly every role with a promotional campaign as large as the Burton film.To that end, early MCU films not being bigger might have something to do with not clicking with audiences (like Dick Tracy).
The point is that MCU's worst fans love to compare a mere 6 DCEU films to the entire MCU as if the MCU had always been as it is perceived to be today, or there's any attempt at a fair, by the numbers comparison. The only way to achieve that is in comparing all that exists for DCEU (as noted earlier, before Shazam) to the first 6 MCU films.
According to...? Characters are rarely--if ever--as heavily marketed as CA over the decades, with several productions adapting the character if he's a joke. Studios do not waste money revisiting a character perceived as unpopular, stupid or a bad concept.
Universal--who held the film rights to the character throughout the 80s/90s, had been wanting to bring another Hulk production before cameras for over the years since the end of the TV series (1982) and its reunion TV movies. The character had been highly successful in live action, and by the mid 90s already logged two animated series, so the character had carved out a place in popular culture. By the time of the Ang Lee film (2003), there was excitement over the idea of a big budget, live action Hulk film, with the title character finally able to do everything his comic book counterpart was famous for. The point is that the Hulk--both 2003 and the MCU version simply prove that he is one of the more popular Marvel characters studios and fans wanted to see. Again, he was not Rawhide Kid, Devil Dinosaur, Millie the Model, or Brother Voodoo, but a proven pop culture hallmark--the aforementioned household name.
Iron Man (2008) earned $585.2 million. Dawn of Justice: $873.6 million. Hardly a case of "barely outperforming" IM.
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Apparently some people couldn't figure out that when I said that Warner Bros came to the conclusion that their DCEU movies have to be exactly like the MCU in order to be successful, I was referring to tone, not structure.
Early MCU movies were almost universally successful (Incredible Hulk is the exception). The difference in numbers between early MCU and later MCU is not that early MCU 'failed to connect', it's that early MCU were normal, average hollywood successes instead of massive, record breaking mega-hits.
I don't disagree that it's unfair to compare the DCEU to the entire MCU, but your comparison is no better. You willfully ignore the massively different situations between the two series of films, as well as the fact that DC's smaller number of films is itself a direct result of the WB's own choices to put all their eggs in one basket (which they're finally moving past now). If the WB had been more willing to make a choice and really move forward, the DCEU could have already reached the point where it would be fair to compare it to the MCU as a whole.
According to the fact that 'Captain America' was almost universally recognized as an insult and general synonym for 'boy scout'/'goody two shoes', etc, throughout my entire childhood.
The hulk tv show only lasted 5 seasons (with the last season cut down to only 7 episodes), it's 'continuation' was just made-for-tv movies and it's rotten tomato score is only 64% (worse than the Norton film). It was a middling success in live action that hasn't been relevant since the early 80s.
The cartoons are meaningless - the vast majority of people over 10 years old have no knowledge of superhero cartoons, and most characters who're big in the comics have had their own cartoons, anyway.
And whatever excitement there may have been for Ang Lee's Hulk (almost certainly focused primarily among the comics/superhero fan community) was destroyed by Ang Lee's Hulk.
Iron Man 2 earned 623.9m, Justice League earned 657.9m. And the truth is that BvS absolutely should have doubled the earnings of Iron Man 1, at least. And if it had had good reviews and good word of mouth it almost certainly would have.
It's more like it lasted four seasons, and the "fifth season" consisted of leftover episodes shot for the fourth but held back for some reason. According to this, the last episodes produced were the 2-parter "The First," which aired halfway through season 4.
Oh, on the contrary. The Incredible Hulk was easily the most successful superhero show of its era, the first comics-based live-action show since Adventures of Superman in the '50s to run longer than three seasons, and one of very few pre-1987 SF/fantasy TV series to last longer than four seasons, even if it was just on a technicality. (The others were The Twilight Zone and The Six Million Dollar Man at 5 seasons each, Captain Video and Adventures of Superman at 6, Fantasy Island at 7, and Bewitched at 8.) By '70s-'80s standards, a "middling" success (literally meaning toward the middle, average) for an SFTV show would've been 2-3 seasons, since most of them got cancelled in 1 season or less. Getting 4-5 seasons was exceptionally good.
TIH was also by far the most grounded and sophisticated superhero show of its era, favoring thoughtful, emotional human drama over lowbrow action. And it's the most critically acclaimed and well-remembered superhero show of the '70s-'80s. It was absolutely relevant and influential in the same way that Star Trek was in the '60s -- because it set the example that shows in its genre could be done at an adult, sophisticated level when they had previously been seen purely as kid stuff.
It's pretty darn funny that nowadays Cap is seen as a better Superman character on the big screen than Superman himself.
The Incredible Hulk TV series was essentially a remake of "The Fugitive" (the TV series from the early 1960ies) in tone and substance, just with 'The Hulk' having to make some obligatory appearance twice an episode on average.
IMO the format worked, but it was hardly 'more sophisticated'. It was really ridiculous HOW they often shoehorned a Hulk appearance into some of the stories at times.
Apparently, both Viola Davis and Joel Kinnaman will reprise their respective roles in Gunn's Suicide Squad film.
Stop the reboot talk started by official statements from the studio calling the movie a "hard reboot"?
That is true up to a point, but we're talking about where it stands among superhero shows specifically. At the time it was made, the relevant comparisons would be Wonder Woman and the short-lived Spider-Man series, plus the failed Captain America and Dr. Strange pilots, and original superhero shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Man from Atlantis, The Gemini Man, etc. All the others were fairly basic, shallow, kid-friendly adventure shows that often pitted their heroes against mad scientists, robots, clones, telekinetics, aliens, or supernatural threats, and tended to be pretty silly. The Incredible Hulk, by contrast, kept its stories almost entirely grounded in real life and human drama, with virtually no SF/fantasy elements beyond the central gamma-mutation premise (plus a couple of episodes about psychics, a bit of vague Eastern mysticism a couple of times, and a random sentient AI in one episode). And Bill Bixby was a thoughtful, soulful, gentle leading man playing a sensitive and tragic character, a major contrast to the macho womanizer heroes of most contemporary action shows.
You talk about the Fugitive comparison as a negative, but remember, The Fugitive was one of the most acclaimed dramas in '60s TV. The very fact that TIH chose to emphasize human drama and emotion despite being saddled with the formula of a superhero action show was what elevated it above its contemporaries and predecessors. As I said, it proved that a superhero show could operate on the level of adult drama rather than children's TV, just as Star Trek had proven for science fiction.
I'll tell you now what I decided about the show back in the early '80s while it was in first run: That criticizing it for its formulaic elements was missing the point, because just about every show at the time was constrained to follow a network- and advertiser-approved formula (which, in the case of superhero shows, usually mandated two appearances per episode). So what made a show noteworthy was how much it managed to achieve within and despite the limitations of its formula, and The Incredible Hulk achieved far more than other superhero shows of the day even attempted. I was often frustrated myself at the contrived, formulaic Hulk-outs, but the drama around them was good enough to excuse them, and there were quite a few episodes that managed to break the mold.
Anyway, whatever you think of the show's quality, the point is that it's objectively wrong to say it was only a middling success. As I said, a 5-season run was extraordinarily good for a pre-ST:TNG science fiction series.
No I didn't - I was simply stating it as an obvious fact. If anything, I think that's one of the reasons the show survived as long as it did.
My point was that even for it's time, "The Incredible Hulk" really wasn't 'more sophisticated' then anything that came before in the 'Superhero genre' - especially when compared to either "The Six Million Dollar Man" or "The Bionic Woman" (the latter ALSO produced by Kenneth Johnson.
Yes, the Hulk wasn't as campy as the Stanley Ralph Ross fare like the 1960ies "Batman" or the 1970ies "Wonder Woman" (which for a time ran right before "The Incredible Hulk" on CBS - and uit did some really good thought provoking episodes on occasion (but the same could be said of "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman" too and such episodes were more the exception than the norm.
"Its time" was my time. I was actually there. I watched these shows in first run as a kid, and I've revisited most of them in recent years. And hell yes, The Incredible Hulk was head and shoulders above everything else in superhero TV at the time. Yes, it had some formulaic and forgettable episodes, as every show did, but on the whole it was unlike any of the others.
And yes, Johnson produced The Bionic Woman. That was also one of the better superhero shows of its era, as was 6M$M in its first season, but they were both pressured to become shallower and simpler over time, because network execs in the era had no faith in the intelligence of the science fiction audience and presumed that SF shows had to be lowbrow. The fact that Johnson was able to resist that pressure so successfully with The Incredible Hulk was impressive -- and it was a sign of the show's success. As was the fact that Johnson was able to resist the pressure to make money-saving changes like giving David Banner a sidekick with an RV that they could use as a standing set. He was able to fight to keep the show true to what he wanted it to be, even to resist attempts to cut its budget -- and that's not something he would've had the clout to do if it had been only a "middling" success.
Turns out Idris Elba won't be playing Deadshot after all, but a thus far non-disclosed "new" character.