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DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond

DeVito was a fantastic Penguin in what remains far and away the best Batman movie ever. But I suppose Christopher's right, insofar as that film's unconventional interpretation of the character does leave room for a more traditional version to be successful in its own right. (And for that matter, though he was unconventional in his own way, Robin Lord Taylor was pretty damned great as Oswald on Gotham.)

As for Catwoman, if we must have more Batman movies (and it does seem inevitable), a Catwoman can only help. Pfeiffer was of course amazing, and Anne Hathaway contributed greatly to making The Dark Knight Rises my favorite of the Nolan films.
 
Oh, quite easily -- by doing a version that's closer to the comics' Penguin, a debonair criminal mastermind, rather than Burton's highly revisionist "sewer mutant" version.

A Penguin closer to how he is depicted in the comics would probably work better in a detective story which is reported to be the direction Matt Reeves wants his Batman movie to go in.
 
I've always wanted to see a better portrayal of the Riddler than we got from Batman Forever or Gotham. The Riddler should be a cunning, calculating criminal mastermind, not a cackling lunatic like the Joker. Jokes are comical or chaotic, but riddles are brain-teasers, puzzles involving layers of deception and requiring intelligence and non-linear thought to solve. A proper portrayal of the Riddler would be an ideal adversary for Batman, the Darknight Detective.
 
Why was Catwoman so badly received? It seems that the main complaints both before and after it was released were that, other than (after it was actually released) that it was just too goofy, were just that it wasn't about Selina Kyle and it didn't have any Batman and wasn't set in Gotham.

Those are all reasonable complaints, though focusing on what it doesn't have seems a little petty, but don't make for a horrible movie. Maybe I'm unique in not minding goofiness.
 
Pattinson as Batman is terrible, way too much baggage in having played a vampire and especially a romance saga vampire, Twilight was so love it or hate it (but with even some fans getting tired of it).

It feels worse in that he was already considered to play, and still influenced, Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man.
 
^ Isn't the whole point of an adaptation to change and there's no point telling a story we already know?

That's what I'm saying. The point of doing a new version is to do something different from previous versions. So if previous adaptations have been revisionist, then it can be good for the next adaptation to be more faithful -- if it serves the particular story you want to tell, which is always, always the most important consideration. We've already seen the Riddler reinterpreted as a cackling loon, but we haven't seen the cunning, rational mastermind version of the Riddler in live action since Frank Gorshin. And that version of the Riddler, as I said, would make an ideal adversary for a Batman movie that emphasizes his role as the world's greatest detective. That's not about blindly copying the original work, it's about intelligently using those specific elements of it that are beneficial to the current work.


Why was Catwoman so badly received? It seems that the main complaints both before and after it was released were that, other than (after it was actually released) that it was just too goofy, were just that it wasn't about Selina Kyle and it didn't have any Batman and wasn't set in Gotham.

Those are all reasonable complaints, though focusing on what it doesn't have seems a little petty, but don't make for a horrible movie. Maybe I'm unique in not minding goofiness.

It was a poor movie even aside from those things. It was the vanity project of an actress too successful for people to say no to, so like most such vanity projects, it was ineptly made, with bad writing, bad costume design, and worse CGI.
 
@TREK_GOD_1 how in the world do you justify saying BVS was well received? 27% critic score on RT (and a pretty low 63% audience score) 44 on Metacritic, 6.5 on imdb, and just a B Cinemascore. How is that "well received"? That ranges from mediocre audience reactions to skewered by the critics.

I seriously doubt BvS would have performed closer to the billion dollar mark than not if it was say, the absolute disasters that were Ghostbusters 2016, or Shazam--if it was not well received. No one twisted the arms of those legions of audience members to make BvS succeed on that level. It had a job to do, and with its flagship characters, and executed it better than most superhero films, as it knew its message, the world it was a part of and did not downgrade or subvert all of the main characters (heroes and villains alike), while continuing to establish the first DC shared film universe with authority.
 
As for the MCU, there was a pretty massive shift in tone between The Dark World and Ragarok, but TWD also had one of the worst reactions of any MCU movie up to that point, and the first one tends to be toward the middle, so a change in the series is understandable.

It was a forced change that was not justified. If the belief was that the Thor films needed to not necessarily be as dark as TDW going into film #3, that did not mean upend the entire tone and development of the character to turn him and his surroundings into comic relief. for Ragnarok's Thor being a goofy bumbler.

He wasn't a fat drunk in Ragnarok or Infinity War, and what we got there will be the standard version of the character, not what we got in Endgame.

I did not say he was--the empty-headed, fat drunk was in Endgame, but the goofy bumbler started two films before that, which is a major change to what was once a character dealing with issues of his destiny / nobility issues--the very thing separating him (i.e., making him unique) from all other heroes in the MCU.

This was also a lot more extreme situation than what Picard went through, and Thor wasn't exactly a non-drinker in the other movies, so it's not like he went from never touching alcohol to what we saw in Endgame.

Picard believed he alone facilitated the slaughter of thousands of Starfleet lives while assimilated as Locutus, so the guilt and weight of it was close to unimaginable, but it did logically result in his extreme behavior seen in First Contact. For Thor, believing killing Thanos changed nothing was disheartening, but that should not have pushed him to being a sloppy, drunk bumbler / comic relief. He should have been at least as determined as the other Avengers to seek a way to reverse what had happened instead of suffering a character-killing blow that robbed him of his journey toward wisdom he struggled with in his earlier appearances.
 
I seriously doubt BvS would have performed closer to the billion dollar mark than not if it was say, the absolute disasters that were Ghostbusters 2016, or Shazam--if it was not well received. No one twisted the arms of those legions of audience members to make BvS succeed on that level. It had a job to do, and with its flagship characters, and executed it better than most superhero films, as it knew its message, the world it was a part of and did not downgrade or subvert all of the main characters (heroes and villains alike), while continuing to establish the first DC shared film universe with authority.

BvS was a massively hyped release with basically a critic proof opening weekend (because no one who cared about superheroes was going to miss it). It also had consistently massive drop-offs week-to-week, because word of mouth and reviews were not great. It literally made more money (domestically) in it's opening weekend than in all the remainder of its run in theaters. That's not the sign of a well received movie. If it were well received, people would've gone back a few times and told others to go see it, and it would've sailed past 1b dollars with ease, just like other similarly hyped movies have done.
 
It was a forced change that was not justified. If the belief was that the Thor films needed to not necessarily be as dark as TDW going into film #3, that did not mean upend the entire tone and development of the character to turn him and his surroundings into comic relief. for Ragnarok's Thor being a goofy bumbler.



I did not say he was--the empty-headed, fat drunk was in Endgame, but the goofy bumbler started two films before that, which is a major change to what was once a character dealing with issues of his destiny / nobility issues--the very thing separating him (i.e., making him unique) from all other heroes in the MCU.



Picard believed he alone facilitated the slaughter of thousands of Starfleet lives while assimilated as Locutus, so the guilt and weight of it was close to unimaginable, but it did logically result in his extreme behavior seen in First Contact. For Thor, believing killing Thanos changed nothing was disheartening, but that should not have pushed him to being a sloppy, drunk bumbler / comic relief. He should have been at least as determined as the other Avengers to seek a way to reverse what had happened instead of suffering a character-killing blow that robbed him of his journey toward wisdom he struggled with in his earlier appearances.
We seem to pretty much be going around in circles here, so I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree and move on.
 
I seriously doubt BvS would have performed closer to the billion dollar mark than not if it was say, the absolute disasters that were Ghostbusters 2016, or Shazam--if it was not well received. No one twisted the arms of those legions of audience members to make BvS succeed on that level. It had a job to do, and with its flagship characters, and executed it better than most superhero films, as it knew its message, the world it was a part of and did not downgrade or subvert all of the main characters (heroes and villains alike), while continuing to establish the first DC shared film universe with authority.

Listing Shazam as a disaster confirms that you are trolling, so there will be no further need to respond.

(To those who don't follow such things, Shazam made 360 million on a 100 million budget. BcS made 870 million on a 250 million budget. Very similar profit margins.)

EDIT: Ah screw it. Can't help myself. Why is BvS considered a disappointment financially? It's the first time we saw Batman since Rises which made over a billion. It's the direct sequel to Man of Steel which made 660 million. You put those two together, and you get 870 million? That's not meeting expectations. Movie made money, but it left a lot on the table. A well received Batman and Superman movie would be doing Avengers numbers. (The first Avengers made 1.5 billion)
 
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