Things DC Needs To Do In Their Stand-Alone Movies
Recently, news broke that Warner Bros. was launching a new line of DC Entertainment films that did [...]
No Women in Refrigerators
Let's just rip this Band-Aid off right now: many of DC's alternate-universe tales, even some of the best-loved ones, center on pretty terrible things happening to supporting characters (often women -- and often Lois Lane in particular) off-panel.
There are a few things at play here: first, we will concede that imperiling (or killing/injuring) those close to the hero is a simple, effectiveway to drive story and motivate your protagonist.
It can also be a handy shorthand and, in many cases, Elseworlds-style stories in the comics have used things like killing off [insert character here] to quickly inform the hero's backstory, presumably becuase there was not time or space to fully explore it.
The problem is that when a capable writer uses such shorthand, it can be misread by the audience, or even later creators. When Kingdom Come killed Lois Lane as part of Superman's backstory, it seemingly opened a floodgate of alternate-universe stories where Lois was subject to all manner of abuse. You see this most obviously in the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game and its tie-in media.
"I see some touches of Kingdom Come here and there that are well thought out and well executed and make me feel good, and I see other places where they just ignore the fact that it's supposed to be a cautionary fable. It's not supposed to be like this!" longtime DC and Marvel writer Mark Waid explained to ComicBook.com. "We weren't saying Lois should die and Superman and Wonder Woman should together for ever and ever. That wasn't the point of the story; that was unintended consequences. Every once in a while somebody will make a choice and defend it as, "Well, it's the way it was in Kingdom Come," to which you just want to go, 'No! No, that was a cautionary fable!'"
At the end of the day, one of the things that the DC and Marvel movies are expected to do is to treat the intellectual properties contained therein with respect. Callously discarding characters rather than coming up with a better way to motivate your heroes doesn't fit that bill.
Strike a balance
While the idea behind a movie like Rogue One was to personalize the titular star WARS and tell essentially a war movie set in the world of the existing films, they did so without undercutting the scope and scale of what they were trying to do.
Yes, it wasn't a Messianic story about people with magic powers doing a battle that would change the course of the universe. Still, it felt important.
The downside to making a superhero movie that is not part of a larger cinematic universe, in an age of pervasive cinematic universes, is that it would be easy for the film to feel small relative to its competitors. Who wants to see The Batman, if he isn't hanging out with The Flash and Wonder Woman?!
Well, that's the challenge: filmmakers will have to find a way to tell stories feel every bit as urgent as the ones that feature a half-dozen A-listers and share their space with eight other popular movies.
With Star Wars, Disney also has the ability to sneak the story into the cracks and crevasses of the decades-long mythology of the franchise. Here, the relatively new franchise has a pretty tight timeline, and the whole idea of the stand-alone movies seems to be geared toward providing filmmakers the freedom to work outside of the DC Extended Universe. So it's a little bit unprecedented...
...although not completely. One could argue that what DC aims to do here is not dissimilar to what it is already doing on TV, or what Ash vs. the Evil Dead did while butting up against the larger Evil Dead reboot in theaters.
Consistent, but distinctive, characterization
While Zack Snyder has made some controversial choices in DCEU characterization, it is rarely argued that he has not been at least consistent in the way he has executed those choices.
The questions around his takes on Superman and Batman, combined with the wild popularity of the DCEU Wonder Woman (who debuted in a Snyder film but was fleshed out elsewhere) have raised some fan eyebrows: what if, in the DC Elseworlds movies, audiences got a more familiar, Richard Donner-adjacent Superman and Lex Luthor, for instance?
There is some danger to that: while the DCEU continues to be the primary source of films and revenue for Warner Bros., it would be dangerous to go too far afield of what is being done in the Justice League movies, unless the world was recognizably a different world, a la Red Son or Kingdom Come.
That is not to say they should or will make more movies with a desaturated color palette and a mopey Superman. It simply means these stand-alone films will not exist in a vacuum, and the filmmakers will have to be aware of what is going on in the DCEU proper so that they can effectively capture what they are trying to do in their movie without the stand-alone films seemingly "discrediting" the DCEU or vice versa.
As with our previous point, this likely comes down primarily to communication. Clear lines of communication should allow filmmakers, for instance, to come up with distinctive takes on characters like Superman and Batman that nevertheless feel like they could credibly be the same character in a slightly different situation.
What we are seeing here is a consistent need for sleight of hand: finding a way to distinguish the stand-alone films from the connected universe films without robbing either of what makes them special, or amking either seem less "legitimate."
Give fans something they want
Probably the most esoteric entry on the list, but arguably the most important: in order for both the DCEU and its stand-alone counterparts to be successful, both versions have to find an audience and give that audience what they want.
Whether that means creating films that are closely based on specific, popular comic book stories or just finding a niche in the ever-growing superhero market that needs to be filled, the thing that is going to make these films work or not is the extent to which they can defeat "superhero fatigue" by creating a product that has a built-in audience ready to roll the dice on it.
Thus far, DC's movies have done this by trying to distance themselves from Marvel's successful (but pervasive) formula, a strategy that has brought them financial success and critical antipathy (along with an ardent fan base who seem locked in a never-ending battle with the rest of the internet). The relatively monolithic look and tone of the DC Extended Universe expanded with Wonder Woman, the tone broadened, and many critics warmed to it.
Now, DC finds themselves in an interesting place: coming off more goodwill than they have had since The Dark Knight, their biggest property (Justice League) about to get its first-ever big-screen treatment, and trying to launch a new line films that are not tied to either the baggage of the past or the goodwill of the moment. They have to be different enough from Marvel, from the DCEU, and from the CW DC Universe while still being identifiably DC/superhero films, and they have to do everything without either overshadowing or being overshadowed by the existing cinematic universe where many of the same characters will reside.
Simple enough, right?
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