‘Superman & Batman’ movie will follow ‘Man of Steel’

[theenglish]

But considering the destruction caused in MoS, wouldn't they want someone (who is not a villain) willing to take on Superman should he run amok again? Batman has protocols to take down everybody. That's really the only Superman-Batman dynamic the modern comic reader knows.

I wonder though if this quote is more in reference to how they meet. I can imagine a story where Waynetec and Lexcorps are working together to find a way to take down Superman or beings like him in the case of a future invasion. It would be logical that Batman might even consider Superman a conspirator in the alien attack and set out to take him down at the beginning of the movie, only to join forces with him as the story progresses.

This is still in very early stages so I wouldn't read to much in to the DKR reference just yet.

On another note, Super-hero movies are perfect to set up like a James Bond series. There is not much difference between a different actor in a movie and a new creative team on a comic when you think about it.

 

[davejames]

But I don't want something that's just Nolanverse Batman with the face and backstory changed. The fun of a reboot is getting to see a different version of the character and the world, to see a new and distinct variation on the theme. I've had my fill of Frank Miller-inspired screen Batman; let's see some Denny O'Neill or Steve Englehart-inspired Batman, say.

Yeah I'd love to see a completely different take as well (ideally something a lot more operatic and comic booky), but I'd also be fine with another Nolan-style Batman as well--especially considering we hardly ever saw much of Batman in those movies anyway!

He was more of a supporting player in a vast and epic crime drama, so it'd be nice to finally see him get some real screen time in a movie and have a much bigger role.

 

[Agent Richard07]

^ Hopefully not at the expense of Clark/Superman, Lois, Perry, etc.

 

[Christopher]

But considering the destruction caused in MoS, wouldn't they want someone (who is not a villain) willing to take on Superman should he run amok again? Batman has protocols to take down everybody. That's really the only Superman-Batman dynamic the modern comic reader knows.

But their confrontation from TDKR is hardly the only story about them being at odds. A far better model, I think, would be John Byrne's Superman: The Man of Steel #3, depicting the first meeting of post-Crisis Superman and Batman. Instead of a physical throwdown, it's more a battle of wits as Batman uses his skill and hyper-preparedness to evade getting taken in by Superman, and gradually convinces Superman that his vigilante methods are necessary in Gotham. And it's a story that works as the first meeting between two characters who start out at odds but gradually come to realize they're on the same side despite their conflicting methods.

Although what I'd like to see is rather the reverse of that. The MoS Clark/Kal-El did a pretty crappy job of being Superman, failing to prevent the city's destruction and not making a lot of effort to safeguard civilians. I'd love to see a story where Batman starts out seeing Superman as the threat, as having great power and insufficient responsibility to be trusted with it, and where Batman shows Superman how important it is to protect the little guy, how it's pointless to save the world if you don't try to save the individuals who inhabit it. Then they'd start out at odds, but Batman would be taking Superman on the next step of his journey, guiding him closer toward true heroism.

Yep, we had 3 actors over 4 movies all theoretically in the same continuity. Audiences never got confused and asked for an origin story every time a new actor stepped in.

Indeed, none of the Burton-Schumacher movies was an origin story for Batman, only for his enemies. The series opened with Batman already active, and his backstory was revealed over the course of the film. Of the eight live-action Batman feature films to date (including the '66 version, the Burton & Schumacher films, and the Nolan trilogy), only one is an origin story. Even Mask of the Phantasm only showed the origin in flashbacks.

 

[The Old Mixer]

series went on hiatus because the studios decided "Okay, we need to impose an arbitrary 'rest' on the franchise for a decade or so and then bring it back." They stopped making movies only because the movies stopped making money, because audiences lost interest. They came back because a later generation was nostalgic for the franchise or because a new production company acquired the rights and wanted to do something with them or whatever.

This idea that there's some sort of rule about franchises needing to "rest" for a while before returning is most likely an invention of fans, particularly fans who feel that a given franchise has gotten stale. Or maybe it's an excuse made by producers whose last couple of films haven't been profitable or well-received -- rather than just admit that they made disappointing movies, they say, "Well, audiences are burned out and we need to give it a rest for a while until their interest returns." But we have hard evidence that that's bogus. After Star Trek: Nemesis and Enterprise got disappointing reactions, fans and producers alike were saying that ST probably needed to lie fallow for a decade or so -- but then the Paramount/CBS corporate split happened, Paramount needed to get a Trek movie into production within 18 months to retain the movie rights, and so they rebooted the franchise and got a movie into theaters just four years after ENT went off the air, well before this imagined "rest" period had run its course... and it was one of the most financially and critically successful Trek movies of all time.

Franchises don't need to "rest." They just need good movies. If you reboot or revive a franchise by making a good movie -- or at least a popular one, and it can be debated whether those are equivalent -- then audiences will respond to it no matter how much or how little time has passed since the last film.

I wasn't trying to suggest that there's a "rule" that studios have to follow...I was merely expressing my opinion, based on my observations of the patterns typical of super-hero movie franchises. You seem to see the seven Batman movies since 1989 as a continuous series with small interruptions, a la Bond. I see them as belonging to two distinct series of Batman movies, with a moderate pause between them.

Conventional wisdom is that where super-hero movies get sequels at all, they tend to make 3 or 4 films, and fans usually don't like 3 or 4 nearly as much as the first two.

Are Batman and Spider-Man examples of a new trend of super-hero franchises that keep churning out movies at a fairly regular pace into perpetuity, occasionally undergoing creative reinventions but never fully stopping? Time will tell, but there are always opposite extreme examples, like the Superman series spending two decades in development hell after Christopher Reeve.

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but "World's Finest" just sounds too "Silver Age" . . .

It seems both old-fashioned and overly fannish.

FWIW (and you probably already know this, but indulge me), "World's Finest" wasn't supposed to be descriptive of the Superman/Batman team...it was supposed to be descriptive of the comic in which they were appearing...an anthology comic in which they were originally featured in separate stories, along with some others, a typical format in the 1940s. The title was World's Finest Comics, along the same lines as All-Star Comics, All-American Comics, More Fun Comics, etc. Superman and Batman didn't start sharing stories in the title until sometime in the 1950s.

I'm of the opinion that Batman's name shouldn't be first in the title, but they'd be idiots not to put him in the title. Unless they want to go for something like The Man of Steel vs. The Dark Knight, but that's not terribly marquee-friendly....

 

[Greg Cox]

If you want to be really retro, just call it Caped Crusaders.

(And the first person who suggests Super Friends should get zapped with heat-vision and a Batarang!)

 

[Set Harth]

Then I'm glad I held back, because I was going to suggest that.

 

[The Old Mixer]

If you call it that, people are going to expect Wonder Woman and Aquaman, and that could get messy....

 

[jbny67]

Superman threw Zod against a wall, and he fell. We don't know if Zod was actually killed or not.

Seriously. Ever since MOS came out I keep hearing this line that Superman killed Zod in Superman II and still shocks me every time it comes up. I never, EVER thought or believed for a single second that Supes left them to die and rot at the bottom of that pit any more than I thought he left Luthor there to freeze. And we know that that wasn't the film makers intent because they filmed a scene with Zod and Co. being taken into custody that was only cut for time and pacing reasons.

They included the scene where Superman delivers Luthor (and ONLY Luthor) to jail. Whether they cut a Zod-in-custody scene for timing or for content, the fact remains they cut it, leaving the distinct impression that Luthor was the only one left alive to be taken into custody. Even the Richard Donner cut deletes the scene showing them alive, which leaves us to think he threw Zod to an icy death in that pit that's so deep we don't ever hear him hit bottom.

He also killed them in the comics, after the pocket universe Zod massacred the population on Superboy's Earth (same thing this Zod promised to do in MoS). Superman executed them with kryptonite. Superman also beat Doomsday to death in the comics. So not only was Superman killing consistent with the Reeves film, it was consistent with the comic books.

I remember seeing this scene for the first time when the movie made it's television debut.

You can see, in the beginning of this clip, that Zod & Co. are being lead off to the police vehicles.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA5d66AnT7s[/yt]

 

[Agent Richard07]

^ Can't really see them and I wouldn't have known they were being taken away if someone didn't point them out.

 

[Jax]

I love how Lex in that video is not cold by wearing just a suit in the Artic

 

[Christopher]

I wasn't trying to suggest that there's a "rule" that studios have to follow...I was merely expressing my opinion, based on my observations of the patterns typical of super-hero movie franchises. You seem to see the seven Batman movies since 1989 as a continuous series with small interruptions, a la Bond.

No, I don't. I'm not talking about what's been done in the past, but questioning the idea that some kind of rest was necessary in the present/future. Whether or not there was a long enough rest between Schumacher and Nolan had no bearing on the success of the Nolan films. The Nolan films worked because their makers did a good job. They would've worked just as well if they'd been made years earlier.

Conventional wisdom is that where super-hero movies get sequels at all, they tend to make 3 or 4 films, and fans usually don't like 3 or 4 nearly as much as the first two.

"Conventional wisdom" means what's widely believed, not necessarily what's actually true. And human beings love to project patterns where none exist. Film franchises run as long as they make a profit. The only numbers that are determinative are the box office returns.

And really, there aren't enough long-running superhero film series to allow drawing any statistically meaningful conclusions about their patterns.

Are Batman and Spider-Man examples of a new trend of super-hero franchises that keep churning out movies at a fairly regular pace into perpetuity, occasionally undergoing creative reinventions but never fully stopping?

I never said they would be. The alternative to one extreme is not the opposite extreme. Most truths lie in the middle ground. I'm only saying that there's no reason to think there's a requirement for a long rest. Sometimes a series goes fallow for a long time, but only because it's had enough failures that there's no interest in a new one. If, as in the case of Spidey or Batman, a series is brought to an end on a fairly high note while audiences still have a generally positive view of it, there's no reason why a reboot couldn't succeed just a few years later. And sometimes a series that did run out of steam due to disappointing box office, like Star Trek, can nonetheless be successfully relaunched without too long a rest. (There were seven years between consecutive feature films, but only four between consecutive productions inclusive of TV and features.)

The point I'm making is that it's not about some kind of overall cosmic pattern that makes things happen a certain way. It's about the individual circumstances and performance of each individual movie series. A series will last as long as it produces successful movies. No, there's no guarantee that it will continue to do so "forever," but neither is there a guarantee that it will stop doing so after some arbitrarily preset number of films, or that there needs to be some minimum interval before it can start up again.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^I never said there were any requirements, guarantees, or cosmic forces at work, and you're the one who brought in the Bond films and other long-running franchises as examples, so what exactly are you getting at? It gets tiresome when it seems like somebody's just arguing the opposite of anything that I say.

 

[Christopher]

^What I'm getting at is exactly what I've said: That there are counterexamples to the idea that film series need some kind of "rest" before being rebooted. That's as simply as I can put it.

 

[DalekJim]

Spider-Man 3 and Batman and Robin were very poor films, so the idea of a reboot was more warmly welcomed. I don't think fans will be as glad to see the back of the established order this time round.

Personally, I'm used to the idea of different Batman continuities so I'm not too bothered. Film has never been the ideal medium for superhero storytelling anyway, as it loses the long-term arc storytelling. A huge reason I'm a fan of the genre in the first place.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^What I'm getting at is exactly what I've said: That there are counterexamples to the idea that film series need some kind of "rest" before being rebooted. That's as simply as I can put it.

And my basic point, going way, way back--and in response to a different poster's statement--was that we simply don't know if they're planning to feature Superman vs. Batman's new Batman in solo films. Whether they could, would, or should is irrelevant. There's been no announcement of such plans, and if they intend to do it, it doesn't seem to be on the schedule until at least after the JL film in 2017.

 

[Trekker4747]

Spider-Man 3 and Batman and Robin were very poor films, so the idea of a reboot was more warmly welcomed.

That's like saying a scratched cornea and a ruptured testicle are both inconveniences.

 

[Bad Bishop]

How long must we wait for a hi-res version of the Batman/Superman logo seen at Comic-Con?

 

[Turtletrekker]

^ Like this one?

 

[Christopher]

And my basic point, going way, way back--and in response to a different poster's statement--was that we simply don't know if they're planning to feature Superman vs. Batman's new Batman in solo films. Whether they could, would, or should is irrelevant.

It is the nature of BBS conversations to branch off into tangents, because there are multiple people involved who have multiple ideas they wish to discuss. In the course of the point you were making, you said, in passing, "They'd be best to give him a rest when it comes to solo films." I was curious about that particular assertion, and I asked why you believed that to be the case. Maybe that's not the original subject you were discussing, but it's a topic that was suggested by something you said, and since this is a discussion board, I attempted to begin a discussion of that new issue. I have as much right to pursue the topics that interest me as do you or any of the other hundreds of people here, and that was the question that interested me.