C'mon, we've got, uh, Shazam Girl, Blue Shazam, Purple Shazam, Dark Shazam and Gray Shazam. I already can distinguish them better than The Eternals.
Great, a whole team of heroes who can't introduce themselves without changing back. Used to be that only Captain Marvel Jr. had that problem.
Yeah, most of the biggest names creators have worked for both companies over their careers. Hell DC even did a miniseries where Stan Lee came over and did his own versions of the big name DC heroes. So is your issue that you think they're all bad actors, or that you just don't wan more Marvel people involved with the DCEU? Like I said before, there's a lot of great actors in the cast who have done a lot more than just the Guardians movies. Because it was supposed to be a prestige streaming drama, and some people seem to be convinced that to be taken seriously, they need to be as dark, gritty, and violent as possible. I don't agree with it, but it does seem to be the attitude a lot of making these shows have.
I think that DC's New 52 Shazam experiment failed. The New 52 is gone--there is no reason they can't go back to using the name Captain Marvel as long as they don't put it in the title of the comic or movie (unless there is a new regulation I don't know about).
Right now, besides a few thousand fans, how would calling your character in a DC movie "Captain Marvel" be viewed by everybody else?
I think it's light enough, especially for DC. Billy/Shazam still is a dork at the most inappropriate times but it's also obvious that at certain points of the movie they are pressured by the villains that levity takes a backseat for a while. Looks like a fun if inconsequential romp now, not sure if i need to shell out money to see it right away or wait until it hits streaming. I wonder if they will bother with post credits scenes now as the current DCEU is coming to an end, no point in setting up other movies or if it will have an insequential end credit like the first one (that was still fun).
Exactly. It's just lazy thinking to assume that self-conscious darkness and grimness is the only way to make quality programming. That's mistaking the surface for the substance, and following the herd rather than thinking for oneself. Besides, the same production company made Stargirl for the same streamer (originally). So it's not like they believed a streaming DC show had to be grim and brutal. I guess maybe it's because they saw Titans as Batman-adjacent because it centered on Dick Grayson, and most people today think that the only way to do Batman is to copy Frank Miller.
I was replying to a comment about how silly it is for the main characters not to be able to say their own names. Captain Marvel was turned into Shazam in 2011 presumably because DC wanted to separate the character from references to Marvel. That version of the character in the comics is done now--there is no legal reason why he has to be called Shazam, so why not turn back the decision. DC has done this with nearly all of their other New 52 changes.
Presumably because the MCU and Disney would put pressure on them not to, to avoid confusion with their own Captain Marvel, and they probably have lots of big scary lawyers.
There are most definitely legal reasons. All you have to do is a quick google and you'll see lawsuit after lawsuit. At one point the agreement was he could be named Captain Marvel as long as the title of whatever he was appearing in wasn't called Captian Marvel. So they started calling it Shazam. So the audience began referring to him as Shazam. Then there was another round of lawsuits or threatened lawsuits and since most of the audience already called him Shazam thanks to previous title rebranding DC fully changed his name. Apparently there are even one off in jokes where characters are about to say his old name and get stopped by other characters for legal reasons.
Because Marvel had trademarked the name "Captain Marvel" during the time that Fawcett was no longer using it and before DC picked up the character. A trademark on a name means that nobody else can use the name as a title or in a promotional capacity, though they can use it within a story. Also, the reason Marvel has had so many different characters named Captain Marvel over the decades is because they've made a point of keeping the title in active use so they wouldn't lose the trademark to DC. I wish that instead of Shazam, they'd gone back to the character's originally proposed name of Captain Thunder. But I think someone else had a trademark on that name by then.
It did not work when someone associated with the MCU moved over to the DCEU. Yes, I'm talking about Whedon's monumental disaster. I said nothing of the sort. My choice was Rooker, due to his versatility (more than anyone else in the GOTG films) and his not being recognized more for having appeared in MCU films. That is not saying the other actors were / are "bad".
Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Chris Pratt, Karen Gillan, and Vin Freaking Diesel are definitely not recognized primarily for having appeared in MCU films. I'd say the same for Dave Bautista too, frankly.
Yeah, let's not go excusing Whedon for the disaster that is Justice League. He has a fair share of responsibility for it too. And the stuff that came out about him because of it....
Absolutely this. And also, personally, I'd have to say Bradley Cooper is more versatile as an actor than Michael Rooker. John C. Reilly, too, and he was in Guardians vol 1. Vol 1 also included acting legend Glenn Close, as well... Justice League as mandated by WB's requirements at the time was never going to be a good movie no matter who directed it. Though in light of what we've learned since, I do believe the poor quality of performances in the movie probably had something to do with how awful the experience of working with Whedon (on the reshoots) was for the actors. But even if that hadn't been an issue because another (decent human being) director was in charge, the movie would still have been a non-sensical chimera of self-contradictory footage because WB insisted on using Snyder's footage but also demanded the whole movie be twisted around into something completely different from what Snyder was trying to make. And it would still have been ugly as hell because of executives' insistence on rushing the film out before FX could be properly done so that they wouldn't miss out on bonus checks.
I didn't say he was the only one responsible, I said don't go excusing him, a fair share of the blame lies on his shoulders.
There's still a lot I like about his version, and the parts I don't like are mostly Snyder's. People seem to forget that Whedon made The Avengers, one of the best superhero team movies ever. If he'd been able to start from scratch and make a JL movie that was 100% his, there's good reason to expect it would have been excellent. But he was hired to do major reshoots on a film from a vastly different director, so the result was unavoidably a hodgepodge. I doubt any director under the same circumstances could've done better. (This is all independent of his personal failings that have come out. I'm speaking only of the film. Many awful people have made great movies, Alfred Hitchcock for example. And no doubt many sweet and lovable people have made terrible movies.) Making movies is complicated. It's hard to get it right. If a movie doesn't succeed, it doesn't mean that a single person deserves "blame" as if they deliberately sabotaged it or something. It just means it's not easy to make a successful film. Look at the overall statistics and it's clear that films fail more often than they succeed. (It's like baseball. Even a high batting average is well under 50%. That doesn't mean the players are bad, just that it's hard to get it right.) So instead of treating the failures as exceptional cases demanding someone to blame, we should focus on praising the successes instead.
Then why assume the (alleged) failings of JL had to be his fault alone? That's the apparent contradiction. Isn't it more logical to conclude that the problem was the hybrid nature of the reworked film? I mean, there are many prior cases where a film that's been subjected to heavy reshoots and restructuring after a director change turns out to be flawed and disappointing -- think of Superman II, for example. Something like that is rarely going to work as well as a film that has a consistent creative vision guiding it throughout. So it makes no sense to pin the blame for JL on one person rather than on the less-than-ideal circumstances he had to work under.