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DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond

You do need to do an origin story for some of the characters whose origins aren't embedded in pop culture, like Aquaman or Wonder Woman, but I think at this point pretty much everyone knows the origins of characters like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, so it's really not necessary to cover them again. Even The Batman is starting off with him having already been established for a couple years at least.

Despite modern custom, you don't really need an origin story to introduce a new character. Dr. No wasn't an origin story. The Incredibles wasn't an origin story. X-Men wasn't an origin story except for Rogue. Even debut movies that explain characters' origins don't have to be centrally about those origins, but can just briefly establish them in the introductory story about something else, like Batman '89 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) or the MCU's The Incredible Hulk.

A first movie does need to introduce the character/s and premise, but we've largely forgotten that an origin story is just one possible way of doing that. Often you just need to tell the story through the eyes of a character meeting and learning about the established protagonist(s) for the first time, like TMNT or the original Hellboy movie. (For that matter, doesn't Batman '89 reveal Bruce's backstory largely through Vicki Vale's investigation?) This is a favorite method for X-Men adaptations, with the viewpoint character being Kitty Pryde in the first animated pilot, Jubilee in the '90s series, Rogue and Wolverine in the movies, Nightcrawler in Evolution, etc. For that matter, I think Marvel Girl somewhat filled that role in the X-Men's comics debut, which might be what established the pattern.

Now, there are some characters where the origin is an essential, iconic part of the story so that it makes sense to start with it. I'd say Superman and Spider-Man are the main examples of that. And that's because both their origin stories are fully realized stories, entire narrative journeys in their own right with conflict and character growth built in. Wonder Woman's origin is a whole story too, in much the same way. So you can get worthwhile movies or pilots out of retelling those fully fleshed-out origin myths.

But a lot of other origins are just a single event: Bruce Wayne's parents are gunned down and he stays mad about it. Barry Allen is struck by lightning. Abin Sur gives Hal Jordan a ring. Even something like Billy Batson getting on a train and being spirited away to meet a wizard in a cave is more a vignette than a complete narrative. If you want to build a whole movie around these origins, you need to invent most of it anyway -- but dwelling too long on such a simple origin tends to make for a shallow story, or one that rehashes the same familiar beats as previous origin stories. In cases like those, it's arguably better just to deal with the origin briefly in flashback or exposition within a story that's about the established, mature hero.
 
I wasn't really talking about whether or not the origins are good or how deep they are, I just meant that at this point that Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man's origins have been covered so many times that pretty much everyone is aware of them, and telling them again would just be repetitive.
 
Wasn't Rosamund Pike the first choice for Lois in MOS?
Upon investigation, it seems there were early reports that Pike was in the running for Man of Steel's female lead, along with Alice Eve and Diane Kruger -- but weirdly, the character in question was supposedly not Lois Lane:

https://variety.com/2011/film/news/3-considered-for-superman-female-lead-1118031515/

Wonder if there was ever anything to this, or if Variety got the story wrong somehow? They're usually one of the more reliable industry news sources.
 
I wasn't really talking about whether or not the origins are good or how deep they are, I just meant that at this point that Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man's origins have been covered so many times that pretty much everyone is aware of them, and telling them again would just be repetitive.

I was responding to your first sentence, "You do need to do an origin story for some of the characters whose origins aren't embedded in pop culture." My point is that you don't need to do that for any character. You need to establish them, but how they got started is not necessarily the only or most essential thing that needs to be established.

An analogy that just occurred to me: A common bit of advice for writers is to start your story at the latest possible moment (and end it at the earliest possible moment). A lot of novice writers -- and even experienced writers in their early drafts -- are prone to "walk to the plot," to start out with preliminaries explaining where the characters started out and how they got into the situation, stuff that isn't really necessary because it's just the setup for the story you're actually trying to tell. It's natural to assume you need to start at the beginning and explain the setup of everything, but with experience you learn that it's expendable, that it just slows things down before you get to the good stuff. It's good advice -- which I've followed more than once -- to drop the first scene or chapter you write in a manuscript. You needed it to set things up for yourself, but the readers didn't necessarily need it to understand your story.

So I think the same goes for an origin story. Explaining how a future superhero got their powers and decided to go into heroing is walking to the plot. It's all setup, and that makes it expendable.
 
Oh, OK, now I understand.
Yeah, thinking about it more, there really aren't that many superhero origin stories that couldn't really be summed up in just one or two scenes or even just a couple of lines.
 
It's a good point that Superman's origin is a great story on its own terms, which is probably why it keeps getting retold in the comics -- post-Crisis, there have been multiple takes on it, whether "canon" or not, and each pretty excellent in their own ways (Byrne's reboot, Birthright, Secret Origin, American Alien, etc.).
 
Yeah, thinking about it more, there really aren't that many superhero origin stories that couldn't really be summed up in just one or two scenes or even just a couple of lines.

Batman '66's premiere episode did it with a single sentence from Commissioner Gordon about Bruce's parents being gunned down by dastardly criminals. That line, and a similar sentence from Bruce in a later episode, was all we ever got in that show about Batman's origins (and not a word about Robin's).

I still think The Incredible Hulk (the 2008 movie) handled the origin fantastically, telling the whole story efficiently in the main titles and then moving on (though that was partly an homage to the TV series).
 
Yeah, The Incredible Hulk is my go to example for how to get your origin out of the way as quickly as possible. I still find it pretty impressive how well they were able to communicate the whole backstory in a dialogue free opening credits sequence.
 
Batman '66's premiere episode did it with a single sentence from Commissioner Gordon about Bruce's parents being gunned down by dastardly criminals. That line, and a similar sentence from Bruce in a later episode, was all we ever got in that show about Batman's origins (and not a word about Robin's).
And the Superfriends didn't explain it at all...
 
Donner Superman (although he did at one point give up his powers) wouldn't just leave Earth for a few years
We shouldn't gloss over "gave up his powers" so easily. He did that with every intention of never having his powers back again.

And he did leave Earth, on a "peace keeping mission in another galaxy" as revealed in Supergirl. We just don't know how long he was gone. :)
 
Tom Holland's Spider-Man hardly had any backstory either. One line about a spiderbite, and one line about Uncle Ben I believe, right?
 
^He probably was the most like J. Michael Straczynski's version, whose last appearance was one of the character's most hated stories.
 
^
Tom Holland was the best on-screen Spider-Man from the moment he appeared.

I disagree.

Reducing him to Tony Stark's sidekick was extremely stupid and hobbled the character.

Far from Home was Holland's best outing as Peter because he was largely on his own for it, but it would've been even better without Happy and FauxFury hanging around.
 
^


I disagree.

Reducing him to Tony Stark's sidekick was extremely stupid and hobbled the character.

Far from Home was Holland's best outing as Peter because he was largely on his own for it, but it would've been even better without Happy and FauxFury hanging around.

Nah, it's easily his weakest outing. But that's it's not as well written as the others.
 
^He probably was the most like J. Michael Straczynski's version, whose last appearance was one of the character's most hated stories.

Dwelling on the unfortunate end of JMS's long run is doing a grave injustice to all the excellent work he did with the character before then. "One More Day" was Joe Quesada's idea and JMS disagreed with many aspects of it. Indeed, he asked for his name to be removed from the last couple of issues because they were more Quesada's work than his. OMD tore down everything JMS had spent six years building up. So it's unfair to blame him for it, and downright grotesque to present it as the defining example of his work.
 
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