Not when you have a Phantom Zone projector.
DC Cinematic Universe ( The James Gunn era)
- Thread starter Samurai8472
- Start date
With the amount of time it takes to film scenes, a day and a half is barely going to be a few minutes of actual footage that will make it to the screen, so it's not really even enough to effect much of the movie.
I think where a lot of the confusion with Man of Steel is that it did make a decent amount of money, but it was not the huge record breaking hit that WB wanted, and the reaction to it was fairly mixed. So it's not a huge beloved recording breaking hit, and I think for a lot of people that makes it a flop.
The only fact that mattered, and the series continued, despite what those drowning in their obsessive hatred would have others believe.
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I had BWL/VWL at my school. BWL is "Betriebswirtschaftslehre" and VWL is "Volkswirtschaftslehre", so it's "Business studies"/"Business administration" (BWL) and just "economics" (VWL). And we were told a plethora of things, among others "Bilanzen" (Balances), the "magic square", sometimes "magic hexagon", which is called "magical", because the objectives are sometimes contradicting each other (e.g. a surge of the economic growth can't work with the stability of prices - because for economic growh, we need to produce and sell the stuff, which means that this stuff frakks with the stability of prices or the employment level).
And we also learned the first rule every participant of the market has to obey - it doesn't matter, what else he does, but this is the rule, he simply must obey, and that is profit maximization. Every other target, the company has, is secondary to this one simple rule.
The third thing, I learned, is the value of the so called "Alleinstellungsmerkmal", the "Unique Selling Point". And this is, why I'm telling you the other stuff, I learned at school: to be profitable, you need to have at least one unique thing, going for you, so the people will buy your stuff.
Back in the early days of comic-books, the USPs were wild. I mean, you had Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on, and every one of them had a unique backstory, which made them distinguishable. They had a colour-pattern, which made them iconic and they had a villain-gallery, which made them stand out. You say "Batman" and immediately, you have the colour-pattern in your head, roughly the outward appearance and at least one or two villains, you can associate him with.
Same thing with the Hulk. You say "David Banner" and immediately you think about Bill Bixby, "the lonely man" and Lou Ferrigno in the wig.
Now the MCU, back in 2008, took a massive risk with the iron man movie. First of all, they hired RDJ - a risk, back at the time. Second of all: They were writing this movie with the whole idea of an interconnected, cinematic universe in mind. And the whole thing could've flopped, if the audiences had a problem with RDJ as Tony Stark or found some other things, that they didn't like. But, fortunately, it worked. It worked so good, in fact, that Marvel could have its own studio, buying the rights to the characters and even managed, to make relatively obscure characters, like 'Star Lord' a hit with the fans.
And of course, DC wanted to have something like that, too.
Now remember the USP-Problem. Sure, one could say "Yeah, but Superman is the USP" - and you would be right. But these TPTB are not fans like us - they studied business economics and all they care about is money. So, in order to make sure, one gets enough money, one must do something different, than the competition - and that means: if Marvel finds its way with quips and friendly characters, we focus on the drama of being a superhero, blabbering something like "Oh, let's explore the theme of 'gods among men'." if the MCU goes pretty coulourful and downright fantastic, the DCEU stays grounded in reality. And then you notice "Oh, people are actually more for the action-cinema-bombast" - which is, dear @StarTrek1701, why "Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Shazam, fucking hell Harley freakin Quinn got solo movies with sequels", these movies are the action-cinema-bombast, giving the fans a good time, other than MoS or both BvS-versions, that were more for the fans of the idea 'gods among men'.
Point is: You have the USP, you start with it, and sometimes you notice - along the way - that your USP is essentially "für'n Arsch", as we in Germany say, basically "all for nothing".
This is also why Wonder Woman, Shazam! and Aquaman were, and remain, the best of the DCEU movies. And I say this as a huge Superman partisan, who would have loved to embrace that character's entries in the series in the same way.
Batman is not plausible in any reality I know. He's as fundamentally silly as other superheroes, and efforts to pretend otherwise are ill-advised.
Tim Burton struck the right cinematic tone for the character all those years ago: darkly playful.
Tim Burton struck the right cinematic tone for the character all those years ago: darkly playful.
When it first came out my friend said it was his favorite, as in it held the #1 spot.
It didn't take long for it to slip a bit in the rankings, though.
Plausible within the "reality" of a given narrative, sure. I was responding to the idea that the character can be "grounded in reality," and that he was somehow unique among superheroes as fitting within that framework.
To say that Batman is more realistic than other superheroes is kind of like saying a one-headed dragon is more realistic than a three-headed dragon. I mean, arguably maybe so, but when we're already in a "reality" with dragons, what difference do the number of heads really make? Same with superheroes.
Well, yeah, people routinely conflate "realistic" with "plausible" just as they do "detached" with "objective."
Batman is an odd one, though, no doubt. He's an outlier in both DC and Marvel for being so prominent despite not being any kind of metahuman or turbo-teched wunderkind. I wonder how many times over the last half-century the editors at DC have had to tamp down some errant writer's pitch to retcon that he's in some respect superhuman after the fashion of Doc Savage. Or did they essentially do that with all the Lazarus Pits stuff?
Batman is an odd one, though, no doubt. He's an outlier in both DC and Marvel for being so prominent despite not being any kind of metahuman or turbo-teched wunderkind. I wonder how many times over the last half-century the editors at DC have had to tamp down some errant writer's pitch to retcon that he's in some respect superhuman after the fashion of Doc Savage. Or did they essentially do that with all the Lazarus Pits stuff?
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