The superhero house at DC Films has been in disarray for a while now. The smash success of this summer’s “Wonder Woman” hasn’t changed that fact, but in case you had any doubt, an extensive new piece from Vulture is a reminder that Marvel’s rival are still figuring out just what the hell they’re doing.
The plans for a grand DC Extended Universe stumbled right out of the gate with “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” which was critically maligned and underperformed at the box office, failing to hit $1 billion, which one would expect from a movie featuring those two titanic heroes. But what’s more interesting is what happened behind-the-scenes. According to Vulture, DC knew they had to fix “Justice League,” which was headed right into production as ‘Dawn of Justice’ was opening. However, executives Geoff Johns and Peter Berg were eager to have somone other than Zack Snyder write the new scenes the movie required. Enter Joss Whedon, who was meeting with the studio about making a separate movie (which turned out to be “Batgirl“), when Johns and Berg struck on the idea to bring him into “Justice League.”
However, reading between the lines, the implication is that Snyder was kept in the dark. Ultimately, the filmmaker exited the film during post-production following the tragic passing of his daughter, and Whedon stepped for the film’s extensive reshoots, but it’s an indication that the right hand isn’t always talking to the left at DC. Indeed, Johns admits that the perception that there’s a lack of an overarching strategy isn’t entirely off base.
“Some of the stuff is true, some of it isn’t true,” he said. “When we talk about things or we’re making deals for people to develop scripts or whatever, sometimes, things leak; sometimes, things are misreported, and it’s frustrating. Because we do wanna go out there and talk about what our strategy is, and this stuff just muddies the water. There’s a lot of internal conversations going on about, How do we help kind of clean that up a bit?”
That scattershot approach also explains their recently announced plans to make spinoff films, under a new banner, that won’t follow the continuity of the DCEU. Among the projects being developed is a Todd Phillips (“The Hangover,” “Old School“) directed Joker origin story movie, divorced from the DCEU, that will feature a new actor as the iconic villain (sorry Jared Leto). In fact, the whole cinematic universe thing is a concept DC is now moving away from.
“Our intention, certainly, moving forward is using the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn’t make sense, but there’s no insistence upon an overall story line or interconnectivity in that universe,” DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson said.
“Moving forward, you’ll see the DC movie universe being a universe, but one that comes from the heart of the filmmaker who’s creating them,” she added, once again pushing DC and WB’s narrative about being a director driven studio.
“Some of the movies do connect the characters together, like ‘Justice League.’ But, like with ‘Aquaman‘ our goal is not to connect ‘Aquaman’ to every movie,” Johns added.
Essentially, it sounds like they are going to do what’s right depending on the situation, which is how they probably should’ve started off this whole thing anyway. DC’s next big test comes with “Justice League” which opens on November 17th.
