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Warner Bros. Circling David Ayer for DC Comics’ ‘Suicide Squad’

^Granted. It makes sense to use CGI if it's a safety consideration. It's just the idea of doing it for purely aesthetic reasons that I have an issue with. Too many filmmakers (very, very much including Zack Snyder) are too much in love with CGI as a toy to play with, overusing it for purposes that are better served by practical effects. We're even seeing a backlash now as filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, and J.J. Abrams on Star Wars, insist on using practical sets and effects as much as possible. I guess we'll have to see which way Ayer falls -- although I wouldn't really expect a Suicide Squad movie to be a CGI extravaganza, since one would think it'd be smaller-scale than a Superman movie.

Why attack Snyder? Peter Jackson, James Cameron and even Raimi's Spider-Man movie contain far more CGI than any of Snyder movies. And really it's not like anybody is really cutting back on CGI. Oddly enough any comic based movie must contain some major threat and do so takes some major effects work. Really only the last Inidiana Jones movie was light on CGI and effects in general but nobody seemed to notice all that much.
 
I wonder what the in-universe reason is for why the founders of so many American cities in the DCU felt compelled to give them extremely generic names. Metropolis, Central City, Star City, Coast City, Midway City, Gateway City, Hub City, Brick City -- in the Supergirl show, we've even got "National City," which I think is new. And apparently there's an actual Civic City associated with the JSA, not only generic but redundant. Not to mention Gorilla City, which, considering that it's a city founded by gorillas, is the most generic name imaginable -- like humans naming a city People City.

There are a few more interesting names out there. Gotham City is distinctive, and it's named for a location in England, so it's plausible (except that it's an alternate name for New York City, which also exists in the DCU). Keystone City and Opal City are okay, a bit contrived-sounding but descriptive. Smallville is incredibly generic, but at least it breaks the pattern. Ditto for Ivy Town, which sounds like a generic university town. You've got some distinctive names like Happy Harbor and Bludhaven, two examples from entirely opposite ends of the spectrum. And there are a couple of distinctive names from imported universes, like Fawcett City and Dakota City.

The latter of which - Dakota - they've since seen reverted to Milestone, if memory serves.

National City? I looked that one up. San Diego County. For real. Not sure if that means they're setting up the Supergirl TV series in metro San Diego. It would be a cool tip of the hat to the city for hosting one of the biggest comics/pop culture/media conventions of the USA, if they are. It'll be interesting to find out.

I have no doubt that the gorillas who live in what we've called "Gorilla City" call it by a different name in a language of their own devising. It will indeed translate as "City of the People" in human languages.

As for the rest of it? There's been a lot of backfilling on the backstories of those places over the decades, and I still don't know if they've gotten around to all of them yet and to what degree. I sometimes wonder myself why they went with the names they did, in-universe. We can thankfully still get answers from James Robinson for Opal City (and he's provided a few) for example. Or Gerald Jones for Dos Rios from the first El Diablo series. Or Chuck Dixon for Bludhaven.

The older ones, though? Roy Thomas and his crew at TwoMorrows Publishing would have some of the answers, though probably not all.
 
New Pictures.

The last of the bunch according to Ayer.

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Batfleck to the rescue, be like...
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Margot Robbie makes such a cutie patootie Harley <3
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And yes, I've spent a fair bit of time on this DCU fictional geography stuff. From about 1985 to 2011 it haunted my thinking a fair bit.
 
Most seemed to be influenced by the Batman model. Take a city's nickname/location and turn it into an actual name.

Keystone City= Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania, the Keystone State and later Kansas City.
Capitol City= Washington DC
Midway City= Chicago
Coast City= Los Angeles
Gateway City= St. Louis and later San Francisco
Central City= Chicago and later Kansas City
Civic City= New York City
Star City= All over the map from the East coast to the Great Lakes to the West Coast, where its been near LA, San Francisco and Seattle at various times.
Ivy Town= Any Ivy League College town. Later placed in New York.
Fawcett City= The Marvels seemed to live in an unnamed city in the Golden Age and Bronze Age, possibly the Earth S NYC. Fawcett City pops up post Crisis and for the most part is said to be in the Midwest; Wisconsin, Minnesota and Indiana have been mentioned. Named for the original publisher of Captain Marvel.
Hub City= East St. Louis. IIRC it's also a postCrisis creation.
Opal City= Baltimore? Supposedly it's in Maryland, a colony founded by Catholics in the 17th Century, but Opal is founded by Puritans in 18th Century? It has a history of Pirates and Cowboys even though it's an East Coast city ? Crazy place
 
Yeah, I have no idea what Margot Robbie is like as an actress or how well she can do the voice, but at least visually, she's pretty on the nose as Harley.
 
Most seemed to be influenced by the Batman model. Take a city's nickname/location and turn it into an actual name.

Keystone City= Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania, the Keystone State and later Kansas City.
Capitol City= Washington DC
Midway City= Chicago
Coast City= Los Angeles
Gateway City= St. Louis and later San Francisco
Central City= Chicago and later Kansas City
Civic City= New York City
Star City= All over the map from the East coast to the Great Lakes to the West Coast, where its been near LA, San Francisco and Seattle at various times.
Ivy Town= Any Ivy League College town. Later placed in New York.
Fawcett City= The Marvels seemed to live in an unnamed city in the Golden Age and Bronze Age, possibly the Earth S NYC. Fawcett City pops up post Crisis and for the most part is said to be in the Midwest; Wisconsin, Minnesota and Indiana have been mentioned. Named for the original publisher of Captain Marvel.
Hub City= East St. Louis. IIRC it's also a postCrisis creation.
Opal City= Baltimore? Supposedly it's in Maryland, a colony founded by Catholics in the 17th Century, but Opal is founded by Puritans in 18th Century? It has a history of Pirates and Cowboys even though it's an East Coast city ? Crazy place

Arguably, Midway could be influenced by Detroit as much as Chicago.

And Star City was once described as neighbouring Boston in 1985. Superboy-Prime's debut story in DC Comics Presents, in fact.
 
Yeah, I have no idea what Margot Robbie is like as an actress or how well she can do the voice, but at least visually, she's pretty on the nose as Harley.
Tara Strong in the Arkham games was verging on creepy (not least because HARLEY QUINN DOES NOT SOUND LIKE A POWERPUFF GIRL) so if they don't quite take it that far, I'm good with it.
 
^Actually, I could totally buy Bubbles as Harley Quinn. She's scary when she gets mad. And they have the same hairstyle.
 
Oh it was a great voice, not arguing that at all :D just saying.

CREEPY
(which fits with the game nicely, so all is well!)
 
Smallville was, of course, named that to indicate that it was an archetypal small town. Which made it kind of a cheat for the TV series Smallville to make it a fair-sized city with its own university and other big-city sorts of institutions, and to justify the name by saying the city had been founded by a Mr. Small.
 
Hmm, what I can find online suggests he did. Okay, then. Still, the original intent behind the name is self-evident.
 
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