Excited. I do hope they add a little more color to the costumes, a smidge more humor while keeping the epic feel.
Spoilers Now that we've gotten Batman v Superman, what are your thoughts on the DCEU?
- Thread starter JD
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Affleck has written his own Batman script. Hopefully he direct his own movie as well. I really want to see a Batman film done in the style of a crime-noir or detective drama.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ben-affleck-has-written-his-879355
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ben-affleck-has-written-his-879355
Oh, I'm sure there will be interest, but there are 10 other films during WW run that are aiming for $200+ million box office, at least half of them expect $500+ million, and 2 are surely aiming for $1bn.
That is a very, very crowded space.
How did you feel about the third?
Now that there are so many "Cinematic Universe" films, both from Marvel and DC, I find it a better idea to judge these films as individuals rather than as a collective. Each film should stand on its own and have its a coherent plot with characters having proper motivation for doing whatever it is they're doing.
BvS is an example of how not to make a CU movie as it spent so much time setting up other movies that it almost forgot to tell a story. I'm worried SS and WW may also suffer from a similar problem. In hindsight, Marvel made the right move by not seeding it's films with lots of setup for the coming Infinity War.
BvS is an example of how not to make a CU movie as it spent so much time setting up other movies that it almost forgot to tell a story. I'm worried SS and WW may also suffer from a similar problem. In hindsight, Marvel made the right move by not seeding it's films with lots of setup for the coming Infinity War.
Were we watching the same Marvel movies?
Well, it's hard to pin down precise reasons -- a lot of it just comes down to the luck of the draw, whether you have the right people running the show. Not all DC TV shows work equally well; I think Gotham is an unmitigated disaster made by people who have as little understanding and respect for the Batman mythos as Zack Snyder and David Goyer have for Superman. The Berlanti Multiverse shows work because their makers understand and respect the material and know how to make fun, effective TV shows. That's a fortuitous combination.
But there's a bit more to it than that. Part of it is that feature films are much less of a writer-driven medium than television; spectacle and directorial style are considered more important than story, so you get directors like Snyder who pride themselves on capturing "the aesthetic" of the comics while paying little to no attention to the essence of their characters and ideas. Part of it is that movies like these have such huge amounts of money at stake and are thus much more driven by marketing and financial considerations than creative considerations. And part of it is that, while Marvel Studios was created specifically and exclusively to make screen versions of Marvel Comics properties, DC Entertainment is a division of Warner Bros., a much larger studio for whom DC is just one of multiple intellectual property streams under their control. So they're less concerned with serving the material and more concerned with shaping the material to fit their larger goals and expectations as a studio.
I'm not as worried about those films. I think the problems with putting a coherent story together come from Zack Snyder, not from the DCEU. After all, Man of Steel wasn't trying to set up a larger universe, but it had its own problems with coherent storytelling. Plot points happened for no reason, just because they were expected, rather than because they were justified by the story. Zod inexplicably chose to land his World Engine in Metropolis, a city that Kal-El had never even been to before, so there was no reason for Zod to target it. After Superman belatedly showed up in Metropolis and saved Lois, the character of Jenny said "He saved us" even though she had no knowledge of Superman's actions on the other side of the world and hadn't seen him save anyone except Lois -- and even though she'd just seen half the city collapse around her with Superman completely absent throughout it all. And then, after piling on all this mass destruction, we got a tag scene that didn't even mention it and miraculously had an intact Daily Planet building full of cheerful, un-traumatized employees, because it was necessary to set up Clark Kent in his reporter job somehow. None of this was earned or justified or arose organically from the story. It was Mad Libs scripting, things randomly tossed in for the sake of being there, without any real connective tissue.
So even if SS and WW are saddled with the need to set up the larger DCEU, that shouldn't hurt them too badly so long as their directors are better at coherent plotting than Zack Snyder, which isn't a difficult standard to achieve.
Me too. As much as I am looking forward to WW I will most likely want to check out Transformers opening weekend.
Funny since Berlanti was one of the writers of Green Lantern. Of course however that evolved from whatever he wrote is debatable.
I will say judging The Dark Knight as 'mediocre' is the contrarian position.
The big difference between TV and movies is that writers have the bulk of the power in the former and no power at all in the latter. The movie scripting process is a chaotic system whereby a script usually goes through many drafts by many hands, only a small number of whom may be credited at all. Often a script is cobbled together from multiple different script drafts by writers working independently of each other, and directors or producers can toss out entire scripts at a whim. The screen credits on a movie may have very little to do with who actually wrote the finished work, or how much of a writer's work remains in the final film.
That said, Berlanti was a producer as well as a writer on Green Lantern, which means he had somewhat more creative control than if he'd just been the writer. Still, the director and the studio would've had more influence over the final work.
Really, I think the GL film had a lot in common with the Berlanti shows, such as a lot of reverence for the comics mythology and a willingness to throw it all into the story. If anything, I think the main problem with the movie is that it tried to cram in too much of the GL mythos and ended up cluttered and unfocused as a result. The approach probably works better on TV because they have time to pace it out better. Or maybe Berlanti, Guggenheim, and Johns just learned from their mistakes on GL and therefore did a better job on TV.
Short answer: Make Mine Marvel.
Long answer: I think WB/DC made the classic Hollywood move of going for the quick copycat money, which resulted in them trying to build in two or three films what Disney/Marvel took about eight films and more than a decade to put together, and the flaws in that strategy are plainly illustrated by the dour, slapped-together mess that is BvS. They went out of their way to turn what could have been a great philosophical showdown into the single setup movie for a bunch of other franchises and ended up burying the only real reason to spend money to see it. I'm not normally a patient person, but I'd gladly have waited for DC to give us more universe-building standalones before giving us Justice League, rather than spend more hard-earned money on movies that will just piss me off. (And yes, I know Transformers is just money-gouging crap, but at least it's money-gouging crap that entertains me.)
I'm not going to see Wonder Woman. I get that everybody thinks that she was the best part of BvS, but I don't like Gal Gadot in the part and nothing about her appearance changed my mind. I'm definitely not going spend two hours watching her running around the trenches of the Western Front.
Suicide Squad? I didn't like the Suicide Squad when it was a comic, and I freaking HATE the version of Harley Quinn they're using. Pass.
I find the DCTV-verse more entertaining, mostly. The only show I watch regularly is Supergirl, which I think makes a lot of mistakes. Flash is good drama, I never liked any version of Green Arrow, and Doctor Who and the DC Also-Rans is a waste of my valuable viewing time. I might be more charitable if they didn't make a such a sausage factory out of crossovers, but...Supergirl and Superman are in a complete other universe, and the cinemaverse is another 'verse altogether...typical DC.
The thread asked, this is my answer: The general feeling I get from the DCEU is that the creators took a look and said, "Holy Hannah! Marvel is lapping us! We gotta scramble!" and they scrambled, badly. I say with a little patience they could have done to Marvel what their animated movies generally do to Marvel animation, which is make it look stupid. but they went for the quick buck.
Make Mine Marvel.
Long answer: I think WB/DC made the classic Hollywood move of going for the quick copycat money, which resulted in them trying to build in two or three films what Disney/Marvel took about eight films and more than a decade to put together, and the flaws in that strategy are plainly illustrated by the dour, slapped-together mess that is BvS. They went out of their way to turn what could have been a great philosophical showdown into the single setup movie for a bunch of other franchises and ended up burying the only real reason to spend money to see it. I'm not normally a patient person, but I'd gladly have waited for DC to give us more universe-building standalones before giving us Justice League, rather than spend more hard-earned money on movies that will just piss me off. (And yes, I know Transformers is just money-gouging crap, but at least it's money-gouging crap that entertains me.)
I'm not going to see Wonder Woman. I get that everybody thinks that she was the best part of BvS, but I don't like Gal Gadot in the part and nothing about her appearance changed my mind. I'm definitely not going spend two hours watching her running around the trenches of the Western Front.
Suicide Squad? I didn't like the Suicide Squad when it was a comic, and I freaking HATE the version of Harley Quinn they're using. Pass.
I find the DCTV-verse more entertaining, mostly. The only show I watch regularly is Supergirl, which I think makes a lot of mistakes. Flash is good drama, I never liked any version of Green Arrow, and Doctor Who and the DC Also-Rans is a waste of my valuable viewing time. I might be more charitable if they didn't make a such a sausage factory out of crossovers, but...Supergirl and Superman are in a complete other universe, and the cinemaverse is another 'verse altogether...typical DC.
The thread asked, this is my answer: The general feeling I get from the DCEU is that the creators took a look and said, "Holy Hannah! Marvel is lapping us! We gotta scramble!" and they scrambled, badly. I say with a little patience they could have done to Marvel what their animated movies generally do to Marvel animation, which is make it look stupid. but they went for the quick buck.
Make Mine Marvel.
There is obviously some setup for the infinity war but it's pretty subtle, if you don't know about it you probably wouldn't notice.
Meanwhile BvS stops in the middle of the movie to show off Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg, all that was missing was a card that says "Coming soon!".
Yeah there's definitely a sense of scrambling going on with DC, but I still think these first two movies were more than enough to build things up, and that a better director could have easily introduced the newer characters and Justice League elements in a more natural and fluid way.
And when you look at how slow and drawn out the first half of BvS was, it's clear there was more than enough room.
And when you look at how slow and drawn out the first half of BvS was, it's clear there was more than enough room.
Now that we have team-ups, it'll be hard to go back to stand-alone movies.
Maybe, but that's a what if, and the reality is they didn't use a "better director." They used the guy whose previous movie made Superman into a wandering bum and an emo killer, and they're using him again to do JL.
Marvel managed three standalone movies after their first team-up. It ain't that hard.
You know what - I was confused. I thought the Christopher Bale Batman VS Bane was the second one, and there wasn't a third; but your right; the second one had the Joker; and I liked that one. It was the third one with Bane I found mediocre. My apologies - but there have been A LOT of Batman films over the years.
I don't know if I would call it subtle at this point, after GOTG and especially Age of Ultron, which kicked it up into Not Subtle At All.
There were an awful lot of contrivances involved to make them make sense, though.
Absent Thor 2, it made little sense for the heroes of Iron Man 3 and Cap 2 to not involve some or all of the other Avengers in each movie's plot devices.
We'll see. I liked the dynamic we saw in Batman v Superman. Might have been better to build up to it rather than start there and break it up.
Yeah but how much of that route was getting general audiences to care about the characters that make up the Avengers? Seeing as unlike DC's Justice League they weren't Marvels heavy hitters at the time.
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