DC Cinematic Universe ( The James Gunn era)
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Not quite. Of the theatrical releases, Aquaman was a massive hit, released after the films you cite.
Though not a theatrical release, Zack Snyder's Justice League did succeed. The problem with the franchise centered on WB shamelessly attempting to turn DC content into something it was never meant to be (starting earlier in the timeline of events with the Whedon disaster), caving to the same doomed-to-fail strategy which produced a boatload of post 1977 Star Wars clones all trying to mine that film's aura, instead of defining its own identity.
Obviously better, culminating with his Justice League, the perfect vision for DC's characters on screen. The largely positive to celebratory response to ZSJL was the great silencer of WB's (and some screaming fans of another studio's franchise) thoughtless decision to drag the creatively vapid Whedon into the DCEU, where he was far out of his depth.
That's not quite how the cause and effect happened. WB brought in Whedon as a script doctor well before Snyder lost his daughter, while the film was still being shot, because they weren't satisfied with how the film was turning out under Snyder. People forget that WB was dissatisfied with Snyder's work after Batman v Superman was panned, and they were already pushing him out of his creative role in the DCEU in favor of Geoff Johns. So Whedon was already involved in reworking the film when Snyder's tragedy happened, and taking over as director for post-production and reshoots was merely an expansion of his role.
So even if the tragedy hadn't occurred, Snyder would still have had his creative control taken away and JL would still have been massively altered from what he wanted. After all, both BvS and Suicide Squad were heavily reworked at studio insistence, remember. So there was never a chance that JL would've been Snyder's unadulterated vision. The only reason the Snyder Cut was eventually made was that WB wanted new material to put on HBO Max during the pandemic when new production was mostly shut down, and it was convenient to capitalize on the hype that had built up around it.
Some of the very few things I miss going from the Whedon version to the SC are some of the comedy bits. In some scenes of the SC a joke or comedic moment is simply excised with the stuff immediately around it left intact. This happens in both the Bruce meets Aquaman and the Bruce meets Flash sequences iirc. The Pet Sematary references are gone; in their stead we just get a bucket list quip from Barry that's only remotely funny because of the way he says "Check!" And the "Dostoevksy!" bit is gone too, because that was the end of the plotline about the Russian family, and all of that is gone. I like the Dostoevsky moment but to get it back in the film you'd have to bring back the Russian family stuff and ain't nobody got time for that shit.
Which is, of course, because those comedic beats were newly shot material to be inserted between those moments. The Snyder Cut removes any material that was shot exclusively for the Whedon version.
A few of Whedon's jokes do work. Diana's casual, "Yes, it looked expensive," response to breaching Bruce's multimillion-dollar security is funnier than whatever the original dialogue was (I don't even remember it). But OTOH, the "thirsty" bit in the early scene between Martha and Lois is just wince-inducing (and both of the very fine actresses involved look like they'd rather be somewhere else). Unfortunately, the latter example is more typical of the theatrical version's dialogue than the former.
True; audiences thought the Russian family scene was out of place--that's how incongruent the hackwork of the JL theatrical had been, something the legions of fans who ultimately inspired WB to greenlight ZSJL did not want to experience again.
Oh, I didn't realize that. I had thought they brought Whedon in after Snyder stepped away, and basically just had him rush through his rewriting and shooting new material so they could get it out on time.
I'd still love to see a fully from scratch Whedon Justice League movie. He was easily one of my top 5 Hollywood creators before it came out that he was such a massive douchebag, and I would I'd love to see what he'd do with the JL characters when he had nothing but his own material to work with. And before someone trys to say he'd just repeat Avengers, I think he's smart enough to recognize that the JL characters are very different from theca Avengers and can't be written the same.
Thankfully, it appears Whedon will never cast his abusive, hack shadow over DC characters again, considering how much he personally destroyed the JL movie..
The DCEU's failure is completely on WB's shoulders. Zack Snyder should never have been given the reigns.
I like MoS but in hindsight it was not a very attractive way to reintroduce Superman into the audiences minds.
Michael Shannon aside Zod is played out, get some villains we havent seen in theaters and scratch Doomsday holy fuck!
I like MoS but in hindsight it was not a very attractive way to reintroduce Superman into the audiences minds.
Michael Shannon aside Zod is played out, get some villains we havent seen in theaters and scratch Doomsday holy fuck!
That's correct, I believe. I haven't seen anything beyond H20 Resurrection, though. Halloween III is an anomaly in the series because the original idea was to release a Halloween film every year but do it as an anthology series so every movie would have a different story as a different cast. When that movie bombed, the studio decided that Michael Meyer's had to be the recurring villain.
I agree with you. I was merely stating what the studio's position was. I think the question was why did the previous continuity get cancelled, and the answer is because that's what the studio wanted. It doesn't make it right, but it is what happened.
Snyder acknowledges that. I treat the extended cut as a series rather than a movie, where different stories are explored more in depth and it wanders from the main plot. Snyder said that he was given free rein to make the story he wanted to make so he put in as many of his ideas for the Snyder-verse as he possibly could. It becomes a glimpse into what could have been rather than a tightly constructed story. Now, before you disagree with me--I'm not defending or promoting Snyder's vision--I am just restating what he said in interviews I listened to.
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You're right. For some reason I was thinking that Aquaman came first but that is just my poor memory.
Halloween III didn't actually bomb, it just didn't perform like the second one. (And nowhere near the first one, naturally.) And funnily enough, returning to Myers didn't exactly bring the franchise roaring back either. H4, 5, and 6 all performed in the ballpark of III.
And in all honesty: I watched both versions - the allegedly bad version and the supposed good version. I don't see it as this cut and dry. Back in the day, I sat down, took my notebook and wrote down a list of pros and cons concerning the Snyder-Cut. And while the pro-coloumn was not entirely empty (I distinctly remember, that I liked Alfred Pennyworth, snark-master galore and "This is Alfred, I work for him"), I couldn't help but notice more parts in the "con"-column.Of course, one part is the absurd length of that movie. And yes, now Snyder might see that as a series, but that's not, what he was hired for. By the way, let's put a pin in the Snyder-Argument, I'll revisit that one later.
Another part, that really annoyed me, was, that Snyder thought "hey, let's overdo the whole slo-mo-thing", the "Wonder-Woman-Yodel" (but that's now completele been debated to death) - I'd rather bring out three scenes, where I said "Yeah, Snyder, that's not better than the supposed 'bad'-Cut."
Take this "Barry saves the woman from dying in a car-crash" - okay, I have seen the TV-Series "The Flash" with Grant Gustin and Candice Patton, I know that Barry Allen and Iris West have their thing and after a short google-search, I knew, that this woman in the car-crash was supposed to be Iris. But every movie could be someones first exposure to these characters and seeing these characters interact with each other, without context, makes this whole scene creepy. This "touching her face, while he's in the speedforce"... ugh. By the way, it is also creepy, if we know the background, that this is supposed to be Iris.
Plus: This whole "truck driver eating a sandwich, slo-mo-cut on that seed falling down" is completely uneccessary.
Or take the "Wonder Woman fighting the bad guys in the Great Baily"-Scene. There, Whedon knew, that with just with two quick changes, this scene could've been made better - and he did. One: Wonder woman does not kill the first villain, when opening the door. Two: Wonder Woman does not explode the terrorist-head-honcho out of the building.But since those scenes were shot, Whedon had to lose the "Can I be like you"-"You can be anything you want"-Part, which is sad, since that's something, I put in the good-part of my list.
Another scene, that is vastly superiour in the Whedon-Cut: The unearthing of Clark Kent. Why? Here we only have Flash and Cyborg. They talk, Barry tries to bond with him (fistbump), gets denied this fistbump and earns it later in Not-Czernobyl.In the Snyder-Cut, we don't have the firstbump-scene, which makes it later come a tadbit unexpected and actually very strange, instead of that, we have Barry talking to Victor, if Wonder Woman would be into younger guys (?!) and we have Diana and Aquaman being present, standing there at the van, just talking and looking as if they wanted to get their hands dirty.
Then we have Wonder Woman looking like a fool, when she's talking to Alfred. Why? First of all, he needs to remind her, that she is standing in front of a laser, second of all, she needs to be told how to prepare a proper tea? And then Alfred says "oh, I'll do that myself"?
Did Whedon shoot this - after all, allegedly he told Gal Gadot, that he could make her look silly in the movie. Well, if that doesn't make Wonder Woman look silly, I don't know, what would even qualify as "making her look silly".
And in the end, there is this whole "How to get rid of Steppenwolf"-scenario.
There I totally side with the Whedon-Cut. Hurting him enough, to make his underlings see, that he's afraid, which turns them against him? That's a smart tactic.
What's no smart tactic? Just punching the guy, stabbing him and then beheading him. This whole "ganging up on the dude" is not a very heroic behaviour from our heros, actually.
So, in conclusion, at least I - ignoring troubles and a**holish behaviours backstage - say, that the Whedon Version is the superiour one. It's shorter, has more humour and gets rid of Steppenwolf in a smart, creative scenario. That being said: the Snyder Cut is not bad, it's just not this awesome flick, that people tend to overhype it into.
Oh, and now let's address this whole "Snyder vs. the publisher"-thing.
Okay, his first movie in the DCEU, where he had more to do, than to play "producer", was "BVS". This movie comes in two versions. One cinematic, one extended. And I bought the blu-rays for MOS and BVS, and when I started watching BVS, I immediately took the "extended" one. And it's bad. I mean - really bad. Bland, boring, downright nihilistic... blech. If that version, I saw, the extended one, is that boring, I guess, I don't want to watch the cinematic thing.
Now, Snyder went public, said something like "Yeah, I know the theatrical cut is bad. I had to do it that way, since the studio wanted it to be short. But you can buy the better extended cut now!"
And I went like "Ain't that smart? You write a movie in a certain way, that it needs to be at least 3 hours long, and when the studio says "are you nuts? Cut it down", you re-cut it, you cut out important scenes, so that you then can say "Yeah, I wanted to do it differently, but... see...the studio."
The Whedon-Cut is a whole different scenario, however, I'm sure, that, if he hadn't to step down, Snyder would've found a way, to sabotage his own work there, too - so, that he could nurish the tale of him being the auteur, who wanted to tell a whole different story, but, alas, the studio didn't let him.
Why do I know this?
Let's have a look at his latest movies - Rebel Moon 1 and 2...
I mean, there he worked with Netflix and they couldn't care less about the length of the movie. I mean, with a studio, that wants to bring the movie in the cinemas, needs to get butts in the seat, I can see, that they'd rather have a short 90-Minute flick, than a long 3-hour movie. But here? This is Netflix. this is "streaming movies from home", where the experience can be 3 minutes or 30 hours. But here, Snyder did the same thing. "Here's my inferiour version, since Netflix wanted it to be in a certain rating, I had to cut some stuff - but don't worry, the complete movie can be seen later in my Snyder-Cut".
Honestly, if I'd be a studio, that dude would never work for me.
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Considering how the DCEU was born--with Man of Steel from the minds of Nolan and Goyer, there was no one better suited to bring their vision of DC to the screen than Snyder, as he (like Nolan before him on his Batman movies--the greatest standalone superhero series ever filmed) understood that this was not simplistic cartoon material like poor adaptations from decades earlier. All instincts paid off in defining DC characters on screen not as something more at home on discount Saturday morning programming (like most comic book adaptations before it), but great fantasy set in a world mirroring reality. The last thing DC movies ever needed were the extremes: either fanboyish dedication to the misguided, corny Salkind Superman movies (Singer with his Superman film), or content that would be mistaken for loud, action-for-the-sake-of-it 1980s catoons like many of the superhero films from the other franchise.
WB had the most coherent vision for superhero films, which they upended attempting to be something else, which led to the many awful, tonally / creatively bankrupt films believed to be like those "across the street" in one way or another (Wonder Woman 1984, the Shazam movies, Blue Beetle), and as a result, WB earned what they recieved. There's a chance they have yet to learn anything from that train-wrecked "comic book movie cloning" mistake.
Good point. H3 ws a mixed bag at best, but the series should have ended there. Bringing Myers back--effectively turning him into Jason Vorhees--was a mistake. Horror characters rarely perform well (creatively) in a series (e.g. Hammer's Dracula or Mummy movies), and as seen in the Myers case, he had no reason to return. After a time, Myers standing in a corner trying to breathe behind that mask, waiting to ambush kill someone lost interest quickly. Personally, the original is the only one I can revisit, while II was barely tolerable, taking its "shock" cues from Friday the 13th--in other words, it lost its own identity and tone.
The theatrical cut of BvS is so incoherent that it hardly qualifies as a movie, just a vaguely movie-shaped pile of loosely related fragments. The extended cut is at least a cohesive and watchable story, but still highly flawed on a conceptual level. More thoughts on my blog: https://christopherlbennett.wordpre...rman-dawn-of-justice-justice-league-spoilers/
Eh, if I'm honest: I don't need my Superhero-Movies to mirror reality. I mean, if I want realism, I go and look out the window. If I want to see Superheroes doing superheroic things, I want Wonder Woman, Superman and the Flash to save the city from Omacs, from Brainiac or Starro, the conqueror. I want them to be heroes and - yes, if that means "fanboyish dedication", then it is that way.
@Christopher In all honesty, I already thought, that the Extended Cut was bad. Which is, why I dubbed this "BvSUCks".
I'm just bewildered that anyone would say Zack Snyder's films "mirror reality" in any way. He's one of the most stylized, artificial filmmakers out there. When he was given Watchmen, a film that should've been realistic in tone, he instead made it with his usual glossy, slick, hyper-stylized, larger-than-life approach, which actively worked against the story's realism.
I'm just saying, if you didn't like the extended cut, you made the right choice to avoid the theatrical cut, because it's enormously worse.
