Originally Posted by
Sutekh
I'd love for a Vixen movie to have been thought out in advance, so that DC could just set it up and hit the ground running with a great story already primed and ready for the big screen, but I feel like that hasn't happened, and if someone (DC or Marvel) rushed out a story with a black female lead, like Vixen or Storm, just to be 'the first with a black female lead, to ride on the success of Wonder Woman and Black Panther' it could fall on it's face.
And then Avi Arad or some throwback like him will roll out and mumble something about audiences not wanting to see movies with black female leads, the way he opined that the failures of Elektra and Catwoman were 'proof' that audiences didn't want movies about strong women, instead of more accurately stating that audiences don't want to see movies that *suck.*
While I like the visual effects, I also kind of think that Vixen is suited to having no real visual effects at all, and could be made on the cheap (saving production money for actors, sets, crew, marketing, etc.).
Sure, comics portrayals (and later animated and Legends of Tomorrow/Arrow appearances) have shown her with an animal-shaped CGI manifestation, but there's no more need for that than there is to portray the energy signatures of psychics or magnetism based characters (option shown as pink fluff on the page) in live-action. The objects floating around gets the motion across all by itself, in a moving medium. Similarly, in a live-action moving medium, Mari doesn't need to be surrounded by a cheetah-image and zippy streaks in the air when she movies at cheetah speed, because it's a moving image and we can see her running fast without any need for visual clues. A brief cheetah sound as she takes off running (or dolphin sound as she leaps into the water, or eagle's cry as she takes to the sky) would be enough to clue the audience in that she's adapting the abilities of those animals. I feel like there's an over-reliance on CGI flourishes, at the moment (the Flash's trail of lightning, in recent years, for example, when he used to be able to run without that sort of lightshow), and a more streamlined Vixen could be done.
While Wonder Woman has been one of DC's more strongly pushed characters for decades, Black Panther has been much lower-tier (and the Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool, possibly even lower on the totem pole), so I'm not convinced that Vixen's level of popularity among comic book fans is as much a factor as it could be. Then again, it might not be entirely useful to compare what Marvel has done with what DC can do, as their circumstances aren't 100% identical.
I do wonder if the trend of 'the first X movie!' is going to continue. Which company is going to bring out 'the first Latino superhero movie' or 'the first Asian superhero movie' or 'the first gay superhero movie?' If a character like Vixen or Monica Rambeau is considered obscure, it's going to get even more so when they are trying to sell movies based on Vibe or White Tiger or Katana or Shang-Chi or the Midnighter or Northstar.