Gunn came out and publicly said the Supergirl script was so good he rushed Supergirl and made it the next movie after Superman, he talked the script up as if it was the best thing ever, he said he hired a great director. Now the movie is a massive bomb, it might not even reach $150 million worldwide and even the positive reviews mostly settle on "It's okay".
That doesn't necessarily reflect on his judgment, since no filmmaker is going to come out publicly and say they're disappointed in an upcoming work. They're going to praise it as highly as they can in hopes that enough people will see it to make them a profit. This is standard practice, so it isn't evidence of anything about any single filmmaker.
But okay, tv shows are now a thing but what's the strategy here? Green Lantern becomes a tv project while Clayface gets a movie? This feels completely counterintuitive, Green Lantern is a space cop, this screams epic space adventure on the big screen while Clayface is a really small character in the big picture and should be a prime candidate for a tv project if you do them.
The audience for TV shows and movies is literally hundreds or thousands of times larger than the audience for comic books. Most people who see a comic-based TV show or movie will have little or no familiarity with the characters or stories it's based on. Heck, the whole reason to do an adaptation in a new medium is to expose a character or story to a new audience that wasn't already there for it. So prior knowledge of the characters has exactly nothing to do with the decision process here. What matters is whether something can work on its own terms for new audiences.
Look at the concept of Clayface, not in terms of comics history, but just as a self-contained idea. Okay, so there's a guy who can change his appearance and turn into a claylike blob. How do you get a whole series out of that? But it easily lends itself to a standalone body-horror movie. By the same token, the Green Lanterns are cops. Space cops, yeah, but fundamentally cops. And there have been countless TV series about cops. (Not to mention that the Green Lantern has been an Earthbound character for much of the series's history. It hasn't always been cosmic adventure.)
And an adaptation isn't required to use its characters the same way the source material did. In the comics, the Incredible Hulk constantly fought the military and supervillains, but the TV series changed the format to something like
The Fugitive, a man on the run helping guest stars of the week with their problems. And it was the most successful live-action superhero series of its era. Then there was
Lucifer, which ditched almost everything from the source comics and turned the protagonist into a police consultant in a murder-of-the-week series. And it was a hit that ran for years. Man-on-the-run shows and homicide procedurals are tried and true TV formulas, so it shouldn't be a surprise that adapting an idea to fit such a formula can often work well.
A shared cinematic Universe should also have a at least a somewhat unified vision and feel coherent
Oh, hardly. What's the point of having multiple series if they all do the same thing? The appeal of a shared universe is that it's eclectic, that it has something to offer for a wide range of different tastes. DC and Marvel have always understood that, which is why they've always had a wide range of different genres and styles in their comics -- grand adventure, gritty street-level crime drama, goofy comedy, high fantasy, cosmic science fiction, etc. Something for everyone, with the audience free to pick and choose just the parts they like instead of feeling obligated to follow everything. A shared universe is meant to be enjoyable on
both levels, whether you want to follow only certain parts of it or collect the entire whole.
It is simply insane to try and build a shared universe but let Reeves do his own Batman over there.
Why? On TV, the Arrowverse built a large shared DC universe, but there were plenty of other DC series running concurrently that weren't in continuity with it. The MCU coexisted with other Marvel movie continuities like the X-Men. Continuity is an option, one tool in the creator's kit. It's a mistake to see it as an overriding requirement.
And the bit we do know about The Brave and the Bold is that he hired the Flash director, writer and producer team to do it which doesn't fill me with confidence. Gunn has praised The Flash as a great movie and some people argued that was just corporate speak because he works for DC now but the fact that he hired the team responsible for that movie suggests he was genuine when he praised it.
I gather that the
Flash movie was heavily altered by executive mandate. It's possible that the original director's cut before the alterations was a much better movie. I actually thought it was a pretty good movie overall, with the worst parts feeling like the sort of things likely to have been imposed on the story by the studio.
He also said he generally wants to let creatives do their own thing as in "I hire great people and let them cook" but that's the wrong approach. You can do that when you do individual, unconnected movies but a shared universe has to be producer driven with directors getting marching orders and having their creative freedom limited.
Wow, I could not disagree more. The continuity should serve and support the individual stories, not oppress them and force them into conformity. The whole has no value if the individual parts aren't strong and worthwhile in themselves.
www.cbr.com
