Will DC Abandon the Multiverse Strategy in Film and TV?

By Russ Burlingame

Historically, DC Comics have had used the concept of a multiverse more, and with more success, than their competitors at Marvel. It's arguably one of the only areas where DC has routinely outperformed Marvel, and has been a key part of the storytelling as DC moved to live-action with the "Arrowverse," The CW's interconnected universe of superhero shows that included Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and more. In the recent past, even the feature films have gotten in on the action a little bit, with Ezra Miller's Flash appearing in The CW's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" event and multiverse travel reported as the key plot of The Flash, out next year.

So, why are fans assuming that the DC multiverse as fans have come to understand it is in peril right now? Well, it goes back to comments made by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.

As part of agressively building up a slate of interconnected DC Universe film and TV projects, Zaslav quipped during a recent interview that there "won't be four Batmans," a comment seemingly aimed at Walter Hamada's "a little bit of everything" philosophy. Under previous management, Robert Pattinson's Batman was allowed to exist in a reality separate from the DC Universe films, where Ben Affleck was the Dark Knight. In The Flash, fans will reunite with Michael Keaton's Batman for the first time since 1992's Batman Returns, and on Titans, there's a version of Bruce Wayne/Batman who has been known to pop in for cameos.

Ignoring animated interpretations (which seems to be the Warner Bros. Discovery philosophy in general), it has been pretty common for years now to have two or more live-action Batman stories happening at once. Fox's Gotham overlapped with the Ben Affleck films, too -- and The CW is gearing up for Gotham Knights, a story that takes place in the immediate wake of Batman's death.

Over at Marvel, the TV and film divisions served different executives for years, and it showed. While Marvel's Agents of SHIELD and the Marvel/Netflix shows were ostensibly set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they rarely (if ever) got to use that connection to build story, and some of the characters and concepts have been outright recast, redesigned, or ignored in the time since Kevin Feige took control of Marvel TV.

Reports emerged shortly after Zaslav took over Warner Bros. suggesting that he wanted to more closely emulate Marvel's strategies. To that end, he was seeking a "Kevin Feige type" for DC, and settled on Guardians of the Galaxy veteran James Gunn and his partner Peter Safran. This latest round of comments suggests he may also be interested in tightening the reins around how alternate universes play into DC's plans.

The curious thing, of course, is that for all his talk about the DC Universe and having a gran plan moving forward, the biggest films on Zaslav's priority list seem to be Joker: Folie a Deux and The Batman 2, neither of which will take place in the "main" universe. So it's entirely possible that fans are reading too much into the comments. Still, with DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, Stargirl, and The Flash all ending, fans of Superman & Lois can't be too confident about what's coming.

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