DCU Movies

[Robotman]

Plus The Flash had a popular tv show that lasted 8 seasons. I don’t think WB will blame the failure on the character as much because of all the other issues associated with the movie, namely Ezra Miller. Green Lantern was just a terrible movie with no real excuses.

[BlackClaw]

The Flash just bombed hard! Looking at a 275-300M finish! That’s terrible! I wonder if WB will give Flash (and Shazam) the same treatment Green Lantern has been getting for the past 12 years haha

The Flash? No. I think everyone knows the failure of the movie can be blamed on the Ezra Miller controversy in addition to WB hyping the film up to the high heavens only for reviews to say the opposite. I do think Shazam will be on the shelf for quite a while due to the one two punch of Black Adam and Shazam 2 flopping.

[Vordan]

The Flash just bombed hard! Looking at a 275-300M finish! That’s terrible! I wonder if WB will give Flash (and Shazam) the same treatment Green Lantern has been getting for the past 12 years haha

Apparently Gunn has a Rogues series in the works, so that might be how they introduce a new DCU Flash.

[Frontier]

Apparently Gunn has a Rogues series in the works, so that might be how they introduce a new DCU Flash.

I feel like you can do a lot with a series about The Rogues (especially since they were no-shows in the movie) and they fit Gunn's sensibilities a lot, though I'm curious what the approach would be.

And you can't really do them without The Flash.

[Maestro 216]

Test audiences are bullshit. BvS had good test audience reactions too btw. They either suffer from the non-random sampling problem or they are deliberately engineered/manipulated by stakeholders to deliver the reactions they want. I suspect it's alittle of both.



It's an overcorrection and an overreaction to the recent Snyderverse movies underperforming. But it seems like WBD thinks the audience wants to burn it all down and treat the Snyderverse like some red headed stepchild.

Which is insane. People like Cavil, Afleck, Gal, and Mamoa. They just didn't like the movies they were in.

[Shockingjustice]

Cyborg never got his movie.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Which is insane. People like Cavil, Afleck, Gal, and Mamoa. They just didn't like the movies they were in.

The problem is now general audiences don't trust movies associated with this current crew to be good anymore. The other problem is their versions of the character are all tied to baggage that is controversial anyways. Starting over honestly makes the most sense.

This isn't a few flops. This is a decade of failure. MoS came out and was polarizing. Batman vs Superman came out and was extremely poorly received and did the unthinkable by having Batman and Superman's first live action crossover ultimately underwhelm at the boxoffice. Suicide Squad got horrible reviews, the only good thing to come out of it was Harley, however it also pretty much killed the Joker on arrival. Justice League was a total dud and made less than the 4 films that preceded it, which isn't good for your big team up film. Imagine if Avengers did worse than Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man 2, and Thor?

Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam were the only movies that got good reviews and lived up to boxoffice expectations. Two of them got sequels. Both of those sequels were hated and flopped and destroyed any goodwill the originals had.

Then pretty much everything since Shazam in 2019 has been a dud. Birds of Prey flopped, The Suicide Squad got decent reviews but underwhelmed at the boxoffice, Black Adam after years of promotion flopped, and now the Flash is an unmitigated disaster.

When only 3 of your 13 films are well received and actually live up to box office expectations, it's a junk franchise.

The goodwill is gone anyways. The last 7 DC films have not broken $400 million world wide. Only one actually broke a billion. There's just no incentive to move forward anymore with this version. It's limping along and why would you want to saddle creators with having to try to repair franchises with a bunch of bad decisions attached? You can just start fresh and make a new Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman etc who don't have the stink on them

[HsssH]

I don't think that anyone here is saying that they should continue with the current version?

[Johnny]

Plus The Flash had a popular tv show that lasted 8 seasons. I don’t think WB will blame the failure on the character as much because of all the other issues associated with the movie, namely Ezra Miller. Green Lantern was just a terrible movie with no real excuses.

Yet they totally blamed GL's failure on the character given how they've treated Hal Jordan since. That was their excuse. I do hope that doesn't happen to Barry but WB does tend to blame their screw-ups on the characters instead of themselves.

[Jabare]

No one should be surprised with the Flash movie. It had too many things to overcome between Ezra the bad taste of the DCEU and frankly people overhyping it before it comes out as the GOAT movie. Let people see it first and make their own opinions

Better hope the Max series do well if the WHA strike doesn’t delay and derail things too much because I have no faith in the theatrical films outside of Batman. Feels like Warner Discovery should take a little hiatus then come back with all their DC films. Distance themselves with as much time as feasible.

I won’t nitpick what earlier films should have done better it’s time to just move on

[Leancarp900]

In hindsight Warner should have just let Snyder finish Justice League then find a new director for the sequel with the same actors.

I don't think the DCEU was unsalvageable until Hamada came in.

[Jokerz79]

In hindsight Warner should have just let Snyder finish Justice League then find a new director for the sequel with the same actors.

I don't think the DCEU was unsalvageable until Hamada came in.

Problem is we saw his Justice League and it was 4 hours long and still shite.

[Leancarp900]

Problem is we saw his Justice League and it was 4 hours long and still shite.

You could have cut it to ~3 hours and it still would have probably been better received than Whedon's final frankenstein cut (not a high bar).

I'm not a fan of Snyder either, but you can't deny that firing him halfway through JL was a mistake. At the very least the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut and all those Cavill's moustache memes wouldn't exist.

[Morgoth]

Justice League reshoots with Whedon was a huge mistake anyways, it just wasn't worth it, and Whedon ended up destroying the movie and his career. Though, it doesn't mean, that Snyder's version would get a way better reception and box office, because he just doesn't know how to make theatrical releases. Streaming is more comfortable for him, because he can make four hours movie and nobody will say anything.

[Doctor Know]

Firing Snyder was a mistake. For better or worse, he was the captain of the ship and had a roadmap of where he wanted things to go. WB should've just hired more directors/producers to work with his ideas and eventually replace him. Rather than leave their IP without a vision or a director for 6 years.

Look at the calendar of events.

2017: Wonder Woman comes out to praise and box office success. Z. Snyder having ghost directed portions of the movie, with Patty Jenkins as lead director.

Snyder is fired before he can put together his JL movie. Despite it being nearly finished shooting. Geoff Johns and Jon Berg swoop in and convince TPTB that DC needs to copycat the MCU. Whedon is brought in to reshoot nearly half a completed movie and he turns Snyder's JL into a clone of Avengers 1. To poor reviews and poor box office. Johns and Berg are fired soon after by the studio. My guess is they promised big returns on going lighter and cloning the MCU. Not to absolve the WB executives who mandated the film be under 2 hours (including end credits) and rushing it out the door to secure quarterly bonuses.


2018: Aquaman comes out. The last film Z. Snyder has anything to do with. It makes a billion at the BO. WB is feeling good.


2019: Shazam comes out. A modest success at the BO and popular with critics. Lost in the shuffle of Captain Marvel and Avengers Endgame coming out in the same Spring/Summer season.


2020: Birds of Prey comes out and loses money. With Sonic the Hedgehog beating it at the BO, before global lockdowns took effect. WW84 comes out to middling reviews and bombs at the BO. You can blame covid, I'm sure lots of people do for the film's failure. But a lot of people really didn't jive with what WW84 was selling.

WB adds to the fire by submitting both BOP and WW84 for Oscar nominations. BOP for VFX and Make-up, WW84 for every category available. Neither was selected for nomination.


2021: After years of WB stating that Snyder's version didn't exist, and that the theatrical cut of the movie was the ONLY version of the film. This sentiment flowing into other WB productions (Animaniacs and Harley Quinn animated series). And after the executives at WB deliberately deleting all the footage Snyder had filmed. WB's then parent company AT&T gives the green light to release the Snydercut. Z. Snyder having saved copies of his film on hard drives he took home after being fired back in 2017.The film comes out on streaming and people love it. The fans, the general audience, the critics and even rival movie directors like the Russo Brothers (Cap America Civil War, Avengers 3+4).

Of the 3 JL type properties that came out in 2021: Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy (cancelled shortly after it was released), Marvel's the Eternals (flop and rotten critic scores) and Z. Snyder's Justice League. Only Justice League was received with positive reviews from fans and critics. WB has what everyone else wishes they had. The genuine article. The Real McCoy. And they decided to do nothing with it. They wasted a moment and opportunity. A "cul de sac going nowhere". One executive put it.


James Gunn's The Suicide Squad comes out and it flops hard. It's a better movie that the 2016 version, but no one went to see it. Speaking personally, I noticed that a lot of people who watched the first one were big fans of the Fast and Furious movies. When the second one came out, they couldn't be bothered. There was an audience there that WB lost the second time around.


2022: Under new management. The Batgirl film nobody asked for gets the axe before release. A tax write off. Even though the film was completed.

Ezra Miller makes his transformation from Flash into Reverse Flash, with a string of various crimes and felonies. WB gets him under control and puts out very little information regarding his status. All the while hyping that Flash movie he's in. They've invested a lot of money into this project. They've got HIGH HOPES it'll pull early DCEU BO numbers.

Dwayne Johnson tries to fill the void left when they fired Z. Snyder. To reshape the DCU movies in his own image, with his own production company. Ambitious plan, and kudos to him for trying. WB left leadership of the films in a vacuum for 5 years at this point. Black Adam underperforms and new management wants a reset of everything. Not that I blame Zaslav. See above list and you can see where things went wrong.


2023: James Gunn is the new head of DC films. He's got his own plans, and they don't involve the Lame duck Flash movie, Aquaman 2 and possibly Blue Beetle movies. The announcement that all films in 2023 don't matter, certainly poured artic water on a struggling brand.

Shazam 2 comes out to middling and box office woes.

Flash is now looking to bomb and all the people who hyped up this film have tough questions waiting for them. Maybe not so tough, since the film universe is being rebooted.


As we saw with the Disney era Star Wars movies, and by JJ Abrams own admission. It really pays to have a plan when you do these multi-movie projects. Looking at the DC films after Z. Snyder left, I get the sense that WB wasn't laser focused on making money. The films they greenlit and funded all run counter to that idea. I imagine some suit at the studio thought all they had to do was just put out a comic book property, any comic book property and it would sell like hot cakes. Oh how wrong they were. Especially in a time when the MCU is losing steam and also having critics and BO troubles. Now should be the time to capitalize on it, but WB is just unprepared to do that. It's a shame and a real f*cking waste!