You may define success/failure as you wish and I get that each of us have different thresholds of what is 'good' and 'bad' but the fact is that they are scrapping this take of the DCU because it has fallen below expectations(both financially and critically).
Restating a belief does not make it a fact. As I and others have said, it is normal for new bosses to scrap their predecessors' projects, even when they're excellent. So it does not follow that scrapping a project proves it was bad.
(Also, falling below financial expectations has even less to do with whether a movie is actually good.
Citizen Kane, arguably the greatest movie ever made, was a box-office flop.)
The root of the matter is that we have been promised a film universe multiple times in the past ten years.
And the outcome proved we didn't
need one. The movies that tried to "build a universe" were crap, and DC finally found its groove when it stopped worrying about the damn "universe" and just let each film be its own thing. That formula
worked. It made DC distinct from Marvel rather than just another of its many lazy imitations, and it allowed the films to stand on their own merits rather than being weakened by a misguided emphasis on interconnection at the expense of the individual stories. It allowed the shared universe to exist but not override the films' own emphasis. It was working fine the way it was.
It is foolish to assume that just because Marvel has a shared universe, everyone else has to copy that formula exactly. Every studio that's tried it has failed miserably, except the Legendary MonsterVerse, which realized the same thing Marvel did, that you need to lay the foundations with strong individual films first before you earn a wider, connected universe. (Although their big crossover film,
Godzilla vs. Kong, was by far the worst film in the series, proving that connection alone does not correlate to quality.)
We were then promised the new and revamped connected multiverse at the end of COIE of the CW with a fairly extensive montage promising Green Lantern and Swamp Thing amongst others.
I think that's reading too much into those cameos. They was more about trying to convey the sense of a multiverse with what footage they had to draw on, and probably to give a bit of cross-promotion to encourage CW viewers to subscribe to DC Universe (now HBO Max). They were opening the door to the possibility of future crossovers, at least with
Stargirl if nothing else, but it didn't mean they already had solid plans for them. It certainly wasn't "promising" anything, just hinting at the potential.
When that fell apart, we got this idea that the Flashpoint movie would reboot their ideas again.
I think that's more a fan conjecture than a confirmed fact. I got the sense that
Flashpoint was more about a) indulging Geoff Johns's obsession with that particular story and b) doing a DCEU equivalent of
Crisis and
Spider-Man: No Way Home, using a multiverse as an excuse for homaging and crossing over with previous film series such as Keaton Batman.
Let me be very clear: I wish the DC films were successful in following the MCU model (or a variation thereof that wasn't rushed).
And I still say the DCEU found its success when it
stopped trying to follow the MCU model. The MCU already gives us that model; why do we need another one just like it? The Distinguished Competition should ideally give us something different, something that offers an alternative to Marvel's approach rather than a mere echo. And
it already does that. It's done so effectively for the past four years. So it's a shame the new creators are reverting to the already-failed approach of trying to copy Marvel.
