Great DC Properties Not Yet In Live Action

With Black Adam and Stargirl both using the Justice Society of America while DC's Legends of [...]

By Russ Burlingame - April 15, 2020 11:09 pm EDT

With Black Adam and Stargirl both using the Justice Society of America while DC's Legends of Tomorrow kinda/sorta shares one of its characters with Black Adam and the Justice League exists on both TV and in film, one has to wonder: how small is DC's universe that in spite of having thousands of characters, so many of them are getting repeated over and over? Of course, that's an absurd rhetorical question. The DC Universe is huge and features literally hundreds of characters who could support their own feature film if handled correctly, just like the Marvel Universe does, and has demonstrated.

The notion that DC has only a small number of characters and properties that get reused over and over is, of course, not specific to live-action. Talk to any DC fan and they'll have years of "all the publisher cares about is Batman" anecdotes they've been sharing with friends. But it's more noticeable in live-action because movies and TV shows cost money and demand a long-term commitment. A publisher who doesn't have much faith in a character can still make them the star of a comic -- and less than a year and a couple of million dollars or so later, it's in the rear view mirror if it's a failure. Not so with TV and film, wherea year and a million dollars will...maybe...get a pilot made. Maybe.

We've put together a list of some of the best DC heroes and teams who aren't currently part of the DC movie universe, or the Arrowverse of TV series airing on The CW, and why we think they might deserve a shot.

Booster Gold

Booster Gold is an incredibly flexible character with a contemporary sensibility and a cool costume design that actually would not need much modification for the big screen, given his backstory.

A disgraced college football star who threw games in order to pay for his ailing mother's healthcare, Michael Jon Carter later became a security guard at a museum that had a wing dedicated to the superheroes of the 20th and 21st centuries. Helping himself to some equipment that would simulate super powers and make him seem to the uneducated rubes of the past like he was a metahuman, Carter stole a time machine and traveled back in time to stop the assassination of a U.S. President (originally Reagan, but eventually that had to be moved forward for timeline reasons).

Eventually he would go from super-pitchman to genuine hero to time cop responsible for keeping the universe safe. Not a bad arc...and if they wanted, they could even set it in the '80s and tie it into the events of Wonder Woman 1984.

Shadowpact

A great supernatural team with a modern edge, Shadowpact was a great comic from Fables writer Bill Willingham, and while it was pretty short-lived, it took a number of minor DC supernatural characters and gave them unique personalities, a cool setting, and some memorable adventures. It seems like a no-brainer to try this as something like a DC Universe miniseries, where the story can be closed-ended up but easily expanded if it got popular.

Steel

A man inspired by Superman to become, essentially, a working-class Iron Man is not just a fun idea, but it's a great way of bringing a great character in while also underlining in a very real way the positive impact the Man of Steel has on the world around him.

Animal Man

Buddy Baker is another character kind of like Booster Gold, who could explore the impact of superheroes on popular culture because he's a celebrity superhero. The difference -- and something that none of DC's movie heroes have going for them yet, so it could be really cool if they used him for a feature film -- is that he's got a family to take care of while he's splitting his time between being a superhero and a famous actor.

Chase

Cameron Chase, a jaded federal agent who first appeared in a Batman comic and eventually went on to get her own series, was not one of the most commercially successful characters of the late '90s, but her title was good, and exactly the kind of story that lends itself to film adaptation. Furthermore, it helped to establish a lot of things about the clandestine organizations of the DC Universe that would remain in place for years.

Tommy Tomorrow

Tommy Tomorrow is an adventurer from the future and Colonel in the Planeteers, an organization of space patrollers operating in the 21st Century. He works for a mysterious superior known as the Commander and is later assisted by co-pilot Captain Brent Wood. Together, the two space officers travelled the universe in the space ship Space Ace and shared various adventures.

Yeah, that's his DC Wiki entry. Other than a brief appearance in Brian Michael Bendis's Legion of Super-Heroes: Millennium, Tomorrow hasn't had a significant role in the DC Universe for a while...but his adventures were key in shaping the imagination of a young George Lucas, so...well, you'd think they had to do something right. It would also introduce some of the ideas from DC's dystopian futures that could be fun to explore and potentially tie together, like OMAC and Kamandi.

Secret Six

The Secret Six -- one of DC's villains-turned-heroes teams -- is one of those books that has never been as big a hit as Suicide Squad, but is arguably more consistently great. It's also a team that's acting, maybe out of self-interest, sure, but still more or less of their own free will, rather than being coerced into trying to reform. So there's a lot of good material there and a wealth of cool characters to choose from to fill out the roster.

Manhunter (Kate Spencer)

kate-spencer-manhunter-vs-mark-shaw-manhunter-banner-e1521994676-1119785-1280x0 — (Photo: DC)

Kate Spencer is a single mom and a district attorney who becomes a Punisher-style deadly vigilante after a number of the cases she tries either end with acquittals on technicalities, or a constant string of prison/asylum escapes. It's one of the best-written books in the last 25 years at DC and expanded and elaborated on some of the unexplored corners of the DCU's past.

Deadman

Deadman was almost a CW show, back before the Arrowverse was really a thing in full swing. The idea obviously has potential, even outside of a superhero context, as it's about a circus acrobat who was murdered and possesses the bodies of unknowing people in order to right wrongs and solve the mystery of his own death. If you take away the costume, which is just a circus outfit and actually doesn't appear when he's visible to regular folks, it wouldn't even have to be a DC movie.

Captain Atom

The downside of the Captain America myth, introducing Captain Atom to TV or film might be a better way to keep capitalizing on Watchmen than just constantly cannibalizing Watchmen. There's a lot more of a world built around Captain Atom than around Doctor Manhattan, and he's ultimately a more human character, which makes him a more viable long-term protagonist.