It’s been a wild year for DC and its TV and movie Universes. What started as a year of promise, with DC having a full slate of highly-anticipated films, TV shows, video games and more, somehow devolved into a year of chaos and unexpected deviations. Half of the 2022 film slate was pushed into 2023 (The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom); Warner Bros. merged with Discovery, a merger marked by a drastic change in leadership; and an entirely new franchise venture (DC Studios) was announced, seemingly putting an end to most (if not all) of the DC movie universe we knew before.
So, now that we’ve gotten to the point where the DCU is definitely getting a fresh start, this is what’s needed to do it right:
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A Fresh Start
We’ve already broken this down more in-depth, but the long-short is this: The DC Universe franchise needs a fresh start, because no matter if you love the SnyderVerse era of DC or not, it’s clearly an era that has passed (for Snyder, for many of the actors, and clearly the studio). Warner Bros. and DC continuing to straddle a fence, where the SnyderVerse only kinda, sorta, being part of the franchise isn’t doing anyone favors. It’s best to give things an official cut-off point with The Flash movie and move ahead with a reboot of the universe.
Simple Core Mythos
All credit due, Zack Snyder and the other filmmakers working with him to build the DC Extended Universe in the 2010s took the approach of approaching all these DC heroes from the perspective of when they were flawed and in the primordial stages of their respective heroic personas. Snyder had a grand and ambitious plan that would’ve seen the Justice League touch the deepest darkness of Darkseid and Apokolips and come back again, cutting across multiple timelines to finally win and establish a brighter vision of the DC Universe.
Even if you were a big fan of that franchise vision, it’s hard to deny that it was somewhat overwrought and confusing. Nearly every DC movie project came with thick fogs of confusion about timing, continuity, and overall connective threads – from Man of Steel’s non-linear origin story to Batman v Superman and Justice League “Knightmare” version of a possible future, where Darkseid turned Superman evil and conquered Earth.
Chess-over-checkers is an admirable goal in franchise universe storytelling, but as we often say on the ComicBook Nation show: Big comic book events need blessedly simple premises in order to get fans invested, and keep them on guided track they can follow – even through complicated crossover jumps.
DC Studios nees to establish a core mythology for the new DC Universe quickly and succinctly. Even if we get total retreads of character origin stories (like Gunn’s Superman reboot), they need to be told within a universe that is clearly interconnected (over TV and films), and where other DC characters, properties, and mythologies all clearly co-exist in the same space, with an established history to that world that all these separate franchise recognize and acknowlege, consistently.
…And it must be easy to follow!
Find A Successful DC Formula
This is something that moviegoing fans have understood for year now: Marvel offers a tried-and-true product, which consumers trust enough to re-invest in time again – even if it’s their only big moviegoing experience for that time. And, even when Marvel movies aren’t the best (it does happen…) fans are still willing to come back in droves again for the next entry, still fully confident in the franchise’s overall value.
DC has tried to give its filmmakers space to make all kinds of films of varying styles and tones over the years – but the core DCU movies and TV shows do need a gameplan that makes for more reliable wins than the franchise has had. The same way that Marvel can tell all kinds of different character stories (more varied than ever in the ecclectic Phase 4 slate) but still feel like Marvel, DC needs to find a formula that establishes a brand fans want to invest in – and one that at the same time feels different than what Marvel is already offering.
Good luck…
Big Events
The reason we need all of the times discussed above is that they are the only real means of DC being able to successfully do the one thing it’s failed to do so far: build up to a major event climax that captivates the masses. It’s almost funny to step back and look over the number of major event storylines DC has cemented as classics in the comics – and yet none of them have been developed into a successful live-action feature film.
That needs to change.
James Gunn has given fans plenty of hints that DC Studios could be building towards any number of big events they recognize. Just getting something as simple as the Justice League battling the Legion of Doom would be a major victory: growing from there into stories like “Tower of Babel”, “Kingdom Come”, “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, or any of the famous crossover stories centered on individual characters would be a great long-term goal to keep in view.
What do YOU want to see in the new DC Universe franchise that DC Studios is building?
