I have to agree. I enjoy the DTVs a lot, and am very happy to see that the earlier reports that they were ending (this back around 2009) turned out to be bogus.
Well, there were never actual reports to that effect, just the usual online misunderstandings and telephone-game distortions of what the reports actually said. To wit, the reports said that WB was giving up on feature-length DCU videos
other than those focused on Superman and Batman (including Justice League stories) -- so, for instance, the in-development movie of
Teen Titans: The Judas Contract was abandoned and we didn't get a
Wonder Woman sequel. (The exception was
Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, but of course that was made as cross-promotion with the feature film.)
The results are films that are on their own excellent to view but, with a few exceptions, rather useless in terms of establishing a continuity.
Continuity has never been a mandatory thing in storytelling. There's no continuity unifying Shakespeare's plays or Arthur C. Clarke's novels (even the various
2001 sequels are not strictly in continuity with one another) or the stories in any given anthology. Complaining that a film series intended to be anthology-like in nature is lacking in continuity is like complaining that a cooking show is lacking in car chase scenes. (Although I wouldn't be surprised if
Good Eats has had a car chase or two.) There's value in stories that form a larger continuity, but there's also value in stories that are complete within themselves and have their own distinct voices.
I'm sure there are a few folks who'd like to see a DTV made that continued the continuity established in Justice League Unlimited, for example.
I can understand why the producers and studio want this series to have a distinct identity from that, though. And I can understand the creators wanting to try new things rather than perpetually revisiting their work from over a decade ago.
That said, I do wish
Crisis on Two Earths had been a full-on DCAU movie as it was originally written to be -- or else that it had been more heavily rewritten to remove the story elements left over from its original role as a transitional piece between JL and JLU. It came off as kind of halfway in between, and that didn't work as well.
And while it's interesting to hear different voices, I'd like to see some continuity there (what's wrong with Christina Hendricks playing Lois again, for example? Or Harmon as Superman?).
Wow, those are among the last examples I would've picked of actors I'd like to hear again in those roles. Maybe that's the answer to the question -- not everyone's going to agree which actors work well.
But then, they have brought back Daly, Conroy, and other DCAU veterans multiple times now, so there is some continuity.
Still, I enjoy them. Though I hope they start doing more non-Batman/Superman stories again. Starting with Wonder Woman and working on down there are plenty of good characters and storylines that deserve DTV treatment (and I don't mean as Showcase shorts, either).
The producers have expressed interest in doing such projects, such as
The Sinestro Corps War and Flash, Aquaman, or Green Arrow films. But the question is whether they'd be profitable enough to do. There's an audience for Superman and Batman movies, and by extension JL movies, but other characters are less mainstream and less likely to sell enough copies to turn a profit for the studio. If we got, say, a live-action
Wonder Woman or
Flash feature film that scored big at the box office, we'd see feature-length DVD movies about those characters; but until then, it's a riskier proposition.
I'd also like to see them start doing some of the classic graphic novels. The Killing Joke, Dark Knight Returns, Gotham By Gaslight, Kingdom Come, even Crisis on Infinite Earths.
There is a 2-part TDKR adaptation in the works. No details announced yet, but I'm hoping it'll be from the same cast and team that adapted
Year One.
As for the rest, we've gotten things like
All-Star Superman and
Year One, so those are possibilities. I'd prefer shorter things like TKJ or GbG; the others are pretty long and epic and would need to be severely trimmed down. And
Crisis is, frankly, a mess. I read it once and couldn't follow it very well (although the library copy I got was missing a few pages). It just had too many characters and story threads, including a lot of stuff that it seemed I would've needed to read the tie-in comics to understand clearly, and it was too unfocused. A film adaptation, especially one limited to 70 minutes, would have to reimagine the story considerably and tighten it up to concentrate on a more unified core cast.
