Back in 2013, the DCEU was kicked off by the ambitious but mostly average Man of Steel; what followed was a flurry of mixed review scores, controversy between production studios and directors and a fierce rivalry between fandoms. After trudging along a rather rocky road and chasing the tail of its biggest competitors, the series has reached an interesting place; one where it’s finally starting to claw its way back to the realm of quality films. While every major release, apart from 2017’s Justice League, was able to breakeven in terms of profits, only two out of six films so far have fared well with reviewers and audiences. Wonder Woman and Aquaman have shown that DC can do their characters proud; what should they do going forward? The answer is two-fold.
What went wrong with DC on the big screen after 2012 is obvious; Warner Bros pushed hard and made high demands at first. The studio was hellbent on catching up to Marvel, believing that ensemble productions in the same vein as The Avengers were the fastest route to the big bucks. So, with only one character clearly established, they ploughed on ahead with Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and soon after Suicide Squad, aiming to ape the competition. With no line of build-up and profits placed first, both projects were doomed to fail. In 2016, the DCEU had already plunged, tripping over the first hurdle because WB wasn’t willing to develop things over time. Most believe Batman V Superman to be bad and Suicide Squad horrible, but I’d say it’s more the other way around. Suicide Squad may have been a jumbled mess but at least it wasn’t trying to shove five future plotlines down the audience’s throat; BVS was a supremely arrogant film, a production that said to its fanbase: “We don’t care about building and developing narratives gradually; we’ll just throw all this junk on the screen and you’ll come and see it no matter what”. After a roundhouse of panning by both critics and fans, the DCEU was off to a bad start.
It did not, as some may have believed, kill off the franchise completely; Warner Bros still had plans and took a different approach with their next major release in 2017; Wonder Woman, which went on to become the brightest star of the series. Everything about Gal Gadot’s smashing solo project corrected the wrongs of previous outings and gave a sense of emotion and character that previous films had been sorely lacking. Of course, I’m talking about the moment Wonder Woman climbs into No Man’s Land and fearlessly charges across the World War One battlefield. It remains the finest moment of the series, marking the point where the DC Universe turned a corner; a moment where it stopped trying to be a franchise too soon and instead focused on making great films first. Moreover, this was also a time when Warner Bros executives stepped away from a project and let the director, in this case Patty Jenkins, have free reign and make the film without any kind of interference.
Sadly, this success did not carry through into Justice League later that year; while it wasn’t as bad as BVS or Suicide Squad, it still ended up committing the same mistakes, refusing to let characters and story threads grow organically. It went all in with a whopping three-hundred-million-dollar budget, again introducing new characters Cyborg and The Flash without giving them time to shine. Because of the near-complete lack of build-up, the film felt extremely anti-climactic and landed with a dull thud. This time the box office earnings took a hit as well. People just weren’t interested in what DC had to offer; in a damning performance, Justice League fell well short of its target gross of seven-hundred and fifty-million and it ended up costing the studio sixty million in losses. It still sits as the lowest grossing entry of the DCEU, certainly not what WB was hoping for.
Now in 2018, we come to Aquaman; while it doesn’t reach the heights of Wonder Woman, the film nevertheless takes the right lessons from that film’s success. James Wan has proven to be a great fit for the production and the film maintains a great fun factor despite an overly long plot. From this, we see a clear direction that the DCEU needs to go in order to rise to the challenge. First, it needs to continue the focus of letting directors loose with their own ideas for each character without getting in the way or making stringent demands. This will result in more productions that stand on their own and allow the DC heroes to take centre stage. The second major problem faced by the franchise stems from its villains; these have ranged from mediocre (Patrick Wilson’s Orm), to generic (Ciaran Hind’s Steppenwolf) and totally abysmal (Jesse Eisenburg’s Lex Luthor). The writers should rethink their antagonists, particularly how they tie into the characters and their struggles, while also giving them more developed backstories. Doing this while avoiding the rushed production cycle will allow DC to cement its place in the often-volatile realm of the cinematic universe, a place where only Marvel can claim to have succeeded. With reports of Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck leaving the franchise, there’s still a mountain to climb. Nevertheless, I wish them luck…
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