There has been a lot of talk lately regarding the newly formed Warner Bros Discovery, its CEO David Zaslav, and the overall company’s handling of its DC Comics properties. The state of DC movies has been in disarray for a while now. After WB’s attempt at a connected cinematic universe failed with the box office disaster that was 2017’s Justice League, DC has become incredibly inconsistent and churned out movies without any real overall direction in mind. While some films, such as Aquaman, Joker and The Batman were big hits, others such as Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984 and The Suicide Squad (as great as it was) have failed to deliver at the box office.
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Despite these mixed results, DC is currently set to continue down this path, with Black Adam, a Shazam! sequel, The Flash, Blue Beetle and an Aquaman sequel, all set for release over the next 16 months. Some of these films have fans incredibly excited, while others have them scratching their heads and wondering what exactly is going on with DC. Instead of laying out an overall game plan for the brand, WBD and its CEO instead chose to shelve the Batgirl film, which had completed shooting and was supposed to hit HBO Max next year. Throughout all of this, it has become painfully apparent that there is no specific plan for DC movies right now, as the studio has instead opted to just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is continuing to build and expand in all sorts of new directions. MCU head Kevin Feige recently unveiled the fifth and sixth phases of the massive franchise, which has also successfully launched a handful of original series on Disney+ while also keeping its theatrical output to at least three films per year. Marvel fans are riding as high as ever right now, while DC fans are left looking around and wondering what is going on. As a result, many people are calling on WBD to hire someone to serve as the “Kevin Feige of DC,” meaning they want someone to steer the overall DC ship in the same way that Feige has done for the MCU since its inception. That sounds great, but is that even possible for DC?
An Impossible Bar
Walt Disney Studios
Saying that DC needs a Kevin Feige is a lot easier than actually finding someone to fill that position. That’s because Feige is the perfect embodiment of exactly what the MCU needed. He’s an incredible producer; he’s a die-hard Marvel fan; he’s a showman that can rile up crowds at events like Comic-Con, and overall, he is quite literally the perfect man for the job. However, when he began to build the MCU, neither he nor many Marvel characters were the massive Hollywood names they are today. Feige built the MCU from the ground up, not knowing if it would work, and over the years he has grown into the revered producer he is today. There were a lot of growing pains and risks early on, but the commitment to ideas and respect for the characters is what has made the MCU work out in the long run.
DC has a lot of issues right now, and to say that all of them would be solved by simply bringing somebody on board to be in charge of the whole thing is a bit too optimistic. Things aren’t that simple, and to expect a new producer to come onboard DC and immediately operate as well as Feige does at Marvel is a big ask. The issues at DC won’t be magically fixed by bringing a new executive on board. Plus, it’s not as if DC hasn’t had anybody making decisions at the top for the last decade. There have been multiple producers that have stepped into that role over the years. Geoff Johns and Walter Berg have held similar positions in the past, and Walter Hamada is currently the president of DC Films at WBD, though reports are indicating that he will be exiting after Black Adam is released this fall.
Recent reports have suggested that the latest person to fill this role at DC will be producer Dan Lin, who looks like he could potentially be a good fit for the position. Lin has produced many big blockbuster films over the last decade, such as the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films, the various LEGO movies, It chapters one and two, as well as a couple of movies in WB’s Monsterverse and several of Disney’s upcoming live-action adaptations of their animated films. The most encouraging factor in Lin’s hiring is that he seems to genuinely be a big fan of the DC characters, as he talked recently about how he loved working on the LEGO Batman film and lamented the cancelation of George Miller’s Justice League Mortal, which he was a producer on. If Lin does indeed take the job, it’s important to view him as a new producer for DC, rather than just as DC’s Kevin Feige. Expecting anyone to step in and immediately be as great a producer as Feige will just lead to disappointment, as it takes time to grow into a role like that.
DC Needs Its Own Ideas
Warner Bros.
There’s no question that change is needed with DC, and there’s a good chance that bringing someone on-board to spearhead that change will ultimately pay dividends and benefit the brand in the long-run. However, a key reason why so many people say that DC needs a Kevin Feige-like figure in the first place is because they just want DC to have a grand extended universe in the same vein as the MCU. While the brand certainly has the stories and characters to undertake such a venture, it also needs to be allowed to differentiate itself from the MCU. If DC were to just copy and paste Marvel’s cinematic universe structure into its own development slate, the new DC cinematic universe would likely be little more than just a carbon copy of what Marvel has already done. It would disappoint because, now that the MCU is nearly 15 years in, the whole cinematic universe idea would just feel like it has been done before.
DC has already attempted the cinematic universe model, and the entire thing ended up being completely derailed in just a few short years. It didn’t work because general audiences did not believe the films were on-par with the consistently loved content Marvel was putting out. While Wonder Woman did well in 2017, it wasn’t due to it being a part of this DC universe; it was because it was a good film with an exciting story and interesting characters. Now, compare that to Justice League in the same year. If it was the cinematic universe model that was bringing audiences in, then Justice League should’ve been a big hit. But it wasn’t.
Instead of just copying what Marvel has done, DC needs to be able to bring its own fresh ideas and concepts to the table, whether that be within the confines of a cinematic universe or not. With that, fans need to be open to the idea of DC doing something different from Marvel. If fans are only looking for the new DC slate to be a duplicate of what the MCU has been, then they could be missing out on potentially great ideas that could finally repair DC’s image after the last decade of missteps.
Stop Trying to Catch Up to Marvel
The biggest mistake that DC made when trying to develop its cinematic universe was rushing into everything in an attempt to quickly catch up to what the MCU was doing. By the time DC was set and ready to launch its universe, Marvel was already two Avengers movies in. This caused DC to rush into a Batman vs Superman movie and then haphazardly try to set up a bunch of characters for the Justice League movie. This resulted in audiences not getting invested in DC’s characters because they weren’t well-developed and their stories weren’t up to par. At that time, DC was so worried about what Marvel was doing that it failed to genuinely understand its own films and plan before jumping head-first into them.
Where DC has excelled the most in the last few years has been in individual standalone movies that aren’t concerned with connecting with anything else. Joker was one of the most talked about movies of 2019, even earning a Best Picture nomination and Joaquin Phoenix a win for lead actor at the Oscars. Less than a year earlier, Aquaman managed to pull in over a billion dollars at the box office. Though that film technically exists in the same continuity as Justice League, the movie itself does basically nothing to connect itself to any other movies. Instead, its sole focus was to build its corner of that universe and just to tell a good story within it. On top of all that is DC’s most recent hit, The Batman, which has been lauded as one of the best Batman stories to ever hit the big screen. It performed incredibly well at the box office; a sequel is already underway, and it did all of that without bothering to set up a larger cinematic universe.
The point here is that DC needs to be allowed to experiment with its own approach to making films based on its characters. While a cinematic universe could certainly be part of that plan, it is not a requirement. One of the common complaints about the MCU these days is that it is too big, and it’s too much to ask casual viewers to catch up on a dozen different films before seeing the newest one. DC has a chance to really differentiate itself by focusing on standalone stories. Whether or not that is what the studio will decide to do is still up in the air. Perhaps Lin will come in and decide to scrap everything and start again with a new universe, or maybe he will decide to push forward with what is already established. Whatever the case, change is certainly coming, fans just need to keep their fingers crossed that it will be in the right direction.
