Warner is Throwing in the Towel on the DCEU
After Marvel Studios took over all of cinema with their interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe, their Distinguished Competition at Warner Brothers started trying to make a DC movie universe, bafflingly dubbed the DCEU, or DC Extended Universe. This experiment entirely failed to take off, with a few movies set in it during well, but Justice League and Batman vs Superman utterly failed to attract the sort of audience that Marvel did with The Avengers.
Now Warner Brothers CEO Kevin Tsujihara told the Los Angeles Times that DC is stepping away from the idea in order to focus on individual movies about their characters.
The upcoming slate, with “Shazam,” “Joker,” “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Birds of Prey,” feels like we’re on the right track. We have the right people in the right jobs working on it.
The universe isn’t as connected as we thought it was going to be five years ago. You’re seeing much more focus on individual experiences around individual characters. That’s not to say we won’t at some point come back to that notion of a more connected universe. But it feels like that’s the right strategy for us right now.
He’s right. Some of those movies look pretty good. Shazam is probably going to be awesome. Birds of Prey has Harley Quinn in it for some reason, but it could be pretty good. Why would you need these movies to tie into Justice League or Suicide Squad, films that no one liked. And this is what hey figured out.
What Patty Jenkins did on “Wonder Woman” illustrated to us what you could do with these characters who are not Batman and Superman. Obviously, we want to get those two in the right place, and we want strong movies around Batman and Superman. But “Aquaman” is a perfect example of what we can do. They’re each unique and the tone’s different in each movie.
Warner was more concerned with setting up a shared universe than they were about telling good stories, and this has never been a problem for Marvel. Well, not until Infinity War, anyway. I rag on Marvel a lot, but Iron Man was a good movie. Thor was a good movie. The Avengers was a great movie. I just don’t want to watch the same movie three times a year every year. There are more Marvel movies than there are James Bond movies. Iron Man came out in 2008 and Dr. No is from 1962. At some point, enough is enough.
Warner didn’t even start with good movies, they just saw dollar signs and wanted to get to where Marvel was as soon as possible. Now that they’ve failed to do that, they’re going back to the drawing board and just trying to make good movies. I know it’s a crazy strategy, but it just might work.
