Will You Miss The DCEU?

[DochaDocha]

I have a feeling it probably was one of the better DCEU movies.

We got a couple options:

1) WB is really terrible at judging quality, axing a good Batgirl while releasing a ton of terrible movies or
2) Batgirl managed to be worse than the slate of released films, making the axing a simpler decision.

WB is indeed bad at judging and producing quality (which is why we got so many bad movies), but the Batgirl movie supposedly tested really poorly with test audiences and WB has been adamant that it wasn't releasable. My personal guess is that we missed out about as much as we missed out on David E. Kelley's Wonder Woman series.

[BatmanJones]

NO.

10 years of BAD movies (excepting the first WW and Gunn’s TSS) damaging the DC brand unbelievably badly.

i’m glad it’s finally getting a mercy killing. I mean, 10 years?? How could anyone possibly let it go on for so long?

While Snyder is on record saying that he wasn’t a fan of superhero comics apart from Watchmen and DKR, Gunn has demonstrated he’s a diehard superhero comics fan. I think his tenure is going to be fantastic but even if it isn’t great, even if it isn’t very good, even if it’s below average, it couldn’t be any worse than what we’ve gotten since they made Snyder the architect of DCU movies. Who on earth thought that was a good idea after his Watchmen, which in fairness was gorgeous to look as as all Snyder movies are, plainly demonstrated a fundamental understanding of the story and its characters and turned the intention of Moore’s story into the opposite of itself? Still, give him a movie or two in the DCEU, don’t make him the darn architect of the whole universe.

And the misguided argument that fans and critics just didn’t want to see something serious is ludicrous. Snyder was faux serious, which is even worse than intentionally unserious, comedic, easy, lowest common denominator movies at Marvel, and lacked any heart whatsoever.

I’m absolutely sympathetic to the Snyder Bros who loved his vision though they were, and continue to be, positively toxic. “Some people just want to watch the world burn” when they don’t get their way. Still, they’re losing a thing they absolutely loved and that’s sad regardless of what I think of the last 10 years and I truly feel for them and can really identify. Tom King’s Batman run was probably my favorite ever with the possible exception of Morrison’s.

After 85 issues of the 105 issue story he’d been building towards over year, at the last minute he had to cram the last 20 issues into something like 5-7 issues. That had a retroactively deleterious effect on his entire run so it didn’t have a chance of its climax of being anything but disappointing in the end as a result of that. In 50 years of being a DC fanatic, after a great many disappointments that was far and away the most I’ve ever been disappointed by DC. I’ll never be able to read the run I was so invested in because after that wrongheaded, last minute decision and Snyder fans very fairly feel the same because they didn’t get to experience the end of the story they loved either.

The King Knightmare arc that many readers were so frustrated by would have been much shorter if he’d known its length was coming at the expense of the ending he had been building up to for so long. But I don’t spend my life raging about that on the Internet or boycotting DC going forward. I’m as disappointed as can be about the King/Batman thing, but I still love DC through its wild ups and downs and I’m not going to stop buying their comics because they made a decision that was so upsetting to me.

I do understand why they did it though—it’s a business and Batman sales were down when they need Batman to succeed more than any other thing—but those low sales were exponentially less damaging than the financial losses, brutal critical response, and damage to the DC brand than anything that could happen on the movie side.

Had we not actually lived through it I couldn’t have imagined a world in which WB allowed things to get so bad and for so long. The constant, radical tone shifts couldn’t have been any worse than they were, but Snyder should have been kindly let go after the unbelievable disaster of BvS. How on earth do you screw up the first live action big screen meeting of DC’s top two characters so badly that it lands with with a 29% RT score and one of the historically worst drops in attendance and box office from its opening weekend to its second one.

Genuine condolences to those who loved the DCEU—all taste in art is purely subjective so none of my opinions about the quality of the movies is any more legitimate than anyone else’s, but by any other relative measure of success or failure, being the only ones that matter to a studio, which is again a business, for 10 years the DCEU was an objective disaster.

I have high hopes for what’s coming next but mostly I’m just glad this is over. Never in my life could I imagine I would actually opt to skip a DC live action adaptation no matter how bad it was. Somehow they managed to prove me wrong. I mean I even came close to finishing Titans and that was an act of masochism, but I’m still going to force myself to finish it eventually. After suffering, so many bad DCEU films, I can’t say the same of those.

In other words, am I going to miss the DCEU? No. I celebrate it every dang day.

[Holt]

Still wonder if one day, we'll ever get the chance to see a cut of Batgirl.

I have a feeling it probably was one of the better DCEU movies.

Or the original Flash ending. Or the Batman cameos in Aquaman 2. Lotta shit that got cut that I'd be interested to see if it leaked.

[Primal Slayer]

The fact that Keaton shot for 3 movies and got edited out of 1 and the other one completely tabled....talk about waste of money WBD. Along with Cavill getting edited out The Flash.

[j9ac9k]

If played in a theoretical movie as they are in the comics, all you'd get is the Squadron getting mind-controlled into working for the villain, then getting their asses kicked by the Avengers and lectured on how far too willing and eager their Earth's populace is to follow anybody who sets themselves up as the authority of the week. NOT a depiction of the SS (sorry) as unironically genuine heroic heroes. After the DCEU, do you really want to subject C/B/A to that?

(Fisher wouldn't have to worry, as the Squadron has no equivalent of Cyborg and, frankly, he's not good enough to be cast as any of the Squadron Supreme's actual remaining characters to begin with.)

If they were to introduce the Squadron, they don't have to be mind controlled. They could be the "Justice Lords" or "Injustice" version similar to their maxi series where they decided to take over their world with the best of intentions. They'd be sympathetic antagonists who are still clearly in the wrong.

[Batgrayson]

5 years ago, I would had missed it, but now? No, I won't.

My ranking is

1.ZSJL
2.BvS
3.MoS
4.WW
5.Aquaman
6.Shazam
7.Aquaman 2
8.Shazam 2
9.Blue Beetle

10.Suicide Squad
11.Flash
12.WW84
13.Black Adam
14.The Suicide Squad
15.Harley Quinn

[Guy_McNichts]

Nope, can't say I will.
Ill-conceived attempt at a shared universe that was built on a poor foundation to start. Even when they did manage to stumble into a success, they didn't seem to know what to do with it. Absolute clown-car of management and waste of talent.

My ranking:
1) Wonder Woman
2) Aquaman
3) the rest
4) stabbing myself with a fork
5) Justice League (both versions)

[Thomas Crown]

I will miss the DCEU that was meant to be, not the walking corpse it became after Warner Bros pushed Zack Snyder away and put Geoff Johns in charge of DC movies.

[bat39]

Yes, I will miss it. I realize that its a minority view on a forum that, by and large, has been pretty anti-DCEU for the better part of this last decade. So I can understand why a lot of people here might be celebrating.

For me, there's a bit of a nostalgia factor at play. The DCEU was around, on and off, for the decade of my twenties. Watched and followed this universe through the end of college, grad school, and the start of my professional career. Being a fan of something for a third of your life isn't a joke.

That said, I think the biggest thing I'll miss is what it could have been. Because it had TONS of potential, every step of the way. And yet, at every step of the way, circumstances - both external as well as internal to the studios - squandered that potential.

I legitimately mourn the fact that we'll never get to see Snyder's full vision realized on-screen. The Snyder Cut of the JL really drove home what could have been. but in its final form it was a consolation price and not a movie we realistically could have seen release in 2017. Yes, his vision of the DCU wasn't for everyone, but nothing is for everyone (I mean, there are a fair number of Marvel fans who hate various parts of the MCU despite its enormous success and broad-based appeal). And there is stuff in there I wouldn't have cared much for (the Batman and Lois romance springs to mind) but also a lot that would have been phenomenal.

Taking a couple of steps back, the fate of Henry Cavill's Superman is probably my biggest disappointment. MOS is legitimately not only my favorite Superman movie, but IMO one of the best Superman stories in any medium. It's a borderline crime for us to have not got an MOS2 at some point, either with out without Snyder at the helm. I loved the slightly more deconstructionist look at Superman's origin that Snyder took, and his gradual evolution of Cavill's Superman into something resembling the 'classic' version - I just wish we'd gotten the space to see more of the that. With time, Cavill could have even surpassed Christopher Reeve as one of the greatest Supermen, if not the greatest...alas, he's reduced to being largely a one-movie wonder that DC/WB, and sadly, a significant section of the fanbase too, seem allergic to.

Then there's the lost potential of Affleck's Batman as well, who wasn't even afforded the dignity of a single solo film! The miraculous thing is that Batfleck does end up having a kind of arc across the three movies he does appear in (BvS, JL and The Flash), which chart his evolution from a disillusioned and bloodthirsty vigilante to a compassionate superhero leader and wise mentor...I just wish we'd gotten to see that really play out on screen.

Who's to blame for all this lost potential? The revolving door of DC/WB suits for sure. But I suppose large parts of the fandom, and the ecosystem of critics and commentators (many of whom may or may not have been on Disney's payroll, at least back in the day, or who at any rate had a bias towards 'light-hearted' Marvel-esq films at one point) also played a role. They all collectively revolted against MOS and even moreso against BvS. The result? Despite both films being pretty successful in their own right (BvS made around 900 million iirc), the suits shit their pants, canned Snyder (admittedly, the sad death of Snyder's daughter was also a factor here) and then brought in Joss Whedon to turn JL into Avengers-lite. A movie that almost every true DC fan, including me, spent their whole lives waiting for was pretty much butchered. Not to mention the butchery of Suicide Squad as well, though that still wasn't as much of a disaster as JL (Jared Leto would beg to differ I'm sure).

And yet, even the post-Snyder DC showed potential. Aquaman became the only non-Batman related DC film to cross a billion. Shazam! was pretty good. I legitimately feel that Birds of Prey was an interesting experiment that could maybe have done better (didn't it release around the start of the pandemic?) WW'84 was...okay. Again I think the pandemic hit it. Ditto with The Suicide Squad. Black Adam could have done well, but unfortunately by that point enough negativity had been built up around the DC brand for it to tank (and seriously...not tying Black Adam to Shazam! to pander to the Rock's ego wasn't the best move).

For what its worth, Hamada's basic idea of focusing on the Multiverse wasn't a bad one in theory. If you weren't going to get Ben Affleck back as Batman, I suppose Michael Keaton would have worked just as well (in any case, we had a young Batman in Matt Reeves new reboot). But yeah...I guess by that point, the momentum simply was in the wrong direction. And lets face...they'd have found a way to fuck it up.

I guess the problem is that even though the DCEU was never formally rebooted on-screen, it kept getting rebooted behind-the-scenes so rapidly that it was impossible to know what the plan was at any given moment. A lot of interesting ideas were thrown out there, but in the end, didn't come to fruition. Keaton's Batman mentoring Batgirl and potentially a Batman Beyond sounded cool. Sasha Calle as Supergirl sounded cool. An MOS2 sequel with Cavill back as Superman sounded cool. A COIE movie down the line sounded cool. The Snyderverse potentially getting back on track sounded cool. But then, DC/WB could never commit to any of this cool-sounded stuff because they'd lost their nerve, and who could blame them? The audiences and critics were baying for their blood...and who could blame them either?

So yeah, I'll always cherish the memories of the DCEU...but I'm sadder about the memories we could have made but didn't get to make. But at the end of the day, for 10 years, it did give us the ever-elusive hope of a full-blown DCU on screen to rival the MCU, and I suppose that's worth something. Even with the new Gunnverse, God knows when we'll get to see a full-blown Justice League in all its glory...

[Holt]

I feel bad for Cavill because I felt he never got to reach his potential as Superman. I always liked the idea of him but unfortunately the writing just wasn’t there. Which is a shame, but I’m ready to move on. But truthfully I was ready to move on once it was clear he wasn’t coming back after JL.

[nx01a]

Henry Cavill as Superman, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, plus Aquaman 1 and Wonder Woman 1 were the best things about the DCEU. Far too many things were wrong with the universe from the start. Better to scrap it and start fresh.
At least Momoa can finally play the part he was born to play: Lobo!

[Exciter]

Henry Cavill as Superman, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, plus Aquaman 1 and Wonder Woman 1 were the best things about the DCEU. Far too many things were wrong with the universe from the start. Better to scrap it and start fresh.
At least Momoa can finally play the part he was born to play: Lobo!

One thing I’ll give Snyder props for is casting. Cavill and Gadot and Momoa were great choices. But you can’t build a foundation on sand.

[bat39]

One thing I’ll give Snyder props for is casting. Cavill and Gadot and Momoa were great choices. But you can’t build a foundation on sand.

Affleck as well. Even Fisher was pretty good as Cyborg. Ezra Miller was really the only dud in terms of Snyder's casting...not that he's a bad actor per se, just not really suited to the role of Barry Allen (and that's leaving aside the real-world controversies).

[Refrax5]

NO.

10 years of BAD movies (excepting the first WW and Gunn’s TSS) damaging the DC brand unbelievably badly.

i’m glad it’s finally getting a mercy killing. I mean, 10 years?? How could anyone possibly let it go on for so long?

While Snyder is on record saying that he wasn’t a fan of superhero comics apart from Watchmen and DKR, Gunn has demonstrated he’s a diehard superhero comics fan. I think his tenure is going to be fantastic but even if it isn’t great, even if it isn’t very good, even if it’s below average, it couldn’t be any worse than what we’ve gotten since they made Snyder the architect of DCU movies. Who on earth thought that was a good idea after his Watchmen, which in fairness was gorgeous to look as as all Snyder movies are, plainly demonstrated a fundamental understanding of the story and its characters and turned the intention of Moore’s story into the opposite of itself? Still, give him a movie or two in the DCEU, don’t make him the darn architect of the whole universe.

And the misguided argument that fans and critics just didn’t want to see something serious is ludicrous. Snyder was faux serious, which is even worse than intentionally unserious, comedic, easy, lowest common denominator movies at Marvel, and lacked any heart whatsoever.

I’m absolutely sympathetic to the Snyder Bros who loved his vision though they were, and continue to be, positively toxic. “Some people just want to watch the world burn” when they don’t get their way. Still, they’re losing a thing they absolutely loved and that’s sad regardless of what I think of the last 10 years and I truly feel for them and can really identify. Tom King’s Batman run was probably my favorite ever with the possible exception of Morrison’s.

After 85 issues of the 105 issue story he’d been building towards over year, at the last minute he had to cram the last 20 issues into something like 5-7 issues. That had a retroactively deleterious effect on his entire run so it didn’t have a chance of its climax of being anything but disappointing in the end as a result of that. In 50 years of being a DC fanatic, after a great many disappointments that was far and away the most I’ve ever been disappointed by DC. I’ll never be able to read the run I was so invested in because after that wrongheaded, last minute decision and Snyder fans very fairly feel the same because they didn’t get to experience the end of the story they loved either.

The King Knightmare arc that many readers were so frustrated by would have been much shorter if he’d known its length was coming at the expense of the ending he had been building up to for so long. But I don’t spend my life raging about that on the Internet or boycotting DC going forward. I’m as disappointed as can be about the King/Batman thing, but I still love DC through its wild ups and downs and I’m not going to stop buying their comics because they made a decision that was so upsetting to me.

I do understand why they did it though—it’s a business and Batman sales were down when they need Batman to succeed more than any other thing—but those low sales were exponentially less damaging than the financial losses, brutal critical response, and damage to the DC brand than anything that could happen on the movie side.

Had we not actually lived through it I couldn’t have imagined a world in which WB allowed things to get so bad and for so long. The constant, radical tone shifts couldn’t have been any worse than they were, but Snyder should have been kindly let go after the unbelievable disaster of BvS. How on earth do you screw up the first live action big screen meeting of DC’s top two characters so badly that it lands with with a 29% RT score and one of the historically worst drops in attendance and box office from its opening weekend to its second one.

Genuine condolences to those who loved the DCEU—all taste in art is purely subjective so none of my opinions about the quality of the movies is any more legitimate than anyone else’s, but by any other relative measure of success or failure, being the only ones that matter to a studio, which is again a business, for 10 years the DCEU was an objective disaster.

I have high hopes for what’s coming next but mostly I’m just glad this is over. Never in my life could I imagine I would actually opt to skip a DC live action adaptation no matter how bad it was. Somehow they managed to prove me wrong. I mean I even came close to finishing Titans and that was an act of masochism, but I’m still going to force myself to finish it eventually. After suffering, so many bad DCEU films, I can’t say the same of those.

In other words, am I going to miss the DCEU? No. I celebrate it every dang day.

I don't think Gunn cares that much about comics, either. Pretty much all of his comic movies have nothing to do with the source material and most of the characters are basically OCs with a comic character name and costume. That's not to say none of those movies are good, but I've never understood how Gunn cultivated this reputation for being such a diehard comic fan. I think we're just trading one juvenile edgelord with no respect for the source material for another.

[kingaliencracker]

I said no.

There are certain actors I'll miss, such as Cavill and Gadot. And there were movies I really liked, such as The Suicide Squad, Shazam, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. But it was horribly inconsistent and wildly unfocused.

I'm ready for a redo.