Comic book writer on why recent DC movies have sucked

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Mark Millar on why Warner Bros is struggling with the DC movies (exclusive)

Hanna Flint
February 2018

When it comes to the success and quality of superhero movies, DC Comics are very much in second place to Marvel.

While Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is going from strength-to-strength, with the latest movie Black Panther securing wide-reaching praise, Warner Bros are struggling to earn the same sort of recognition for their movies. Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad and Justice League have all been panned by critics with only Wonder Woman receiving any sort of praise.

So what are Warner Bros doing wrong? We put that question to Mark Millar during our conversation with him about his Kick-a$$ reboot.

The celebrated comic book writer has worked both at Marvel Comics and DC Comics and says that the problem is simple. “The characters aren’t cinematic and I say this as a massive DC fan who much prefers their characters to Marvel’s,” Millar says.

Read more:

uk.movies.yahoo.com/mark-millar-warner-bros-struggling-dc-movies-exclusive-153204212.html

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Upcoming DC Comics movies:

collider.com/upcoming-dc-movies/#flashpoint

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Aquaman


Release Date: December 21, 2018

Status: In post-production

Director: James Wan

Cast: Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, and Willem Dafoe


What We Know So Far: Momoa made his first appearance in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and co-stars in Justice League, but Warner Bros. enlisted Furious 7 and The Conjuring helmer James Wan to direct the Aquaman standalone, and after attempting to fast-track this thing to production with multiple screenwriters writing separate drafts, Wan and DC Films head Geoff Johns convened, nailed down the story, and set Gangster Squad scribe Will Beall to pen the script. The ensemble cast includes Nicole Kidman as Queen Atlanna and Patrick Wilson as the film’s antagonist, Aquaman’s half-brother Orm.

[DECKS]

DC can't ever seem to get the villain right.

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Why ‘Justice League’ failed — and where DC goes from here
By Steven Zeitchik November 20, 2017


A little more than three years ago, Warner Bros. announced ambitious plans for its DC Comics properties.

The film studio would undertake no fewer than 10 DC movies, chief executive Kevin Tsujihara said. It would introduce various characters and build up to a pair of “Justice League” ensemble pictures, which in turn would allow it to spin off more stand-alone movies. The template? Rival Marvel, which began with “Iron Man” in 2008 and four years later evolved into a massively successful “Avengers” film, which then became the gift that kept on giving (17 movies and counting, including the current smash “Thor: Ragnarok.”)

This past weekend, all those plans blew up.

Despite its status as one of the most expensive movies in history, “Justice League” grossed just $96 million and appears headed to a relatively quick exit from domestic theaters. All the star power and extravagant spending — a budget reportedly near $300 million — couldn’t get the Superman-Batman-Wonder Woman film to a baseline respectable return of $110 million. In fact, four other superhero movies, nearly all with fewer stars and expectations, opened to higher numbers than “Justice League” this year alone.

So dismal was the opening that it throws into doubt some of those DC movies “Justice League” was supposed to spin off, including “Flashpoint,” “Cyborg” and, of course, “Justice League: Part 2.”

The studio was beset by specific problems on the film, not least a personal tragedy for director Zack Snyder that did not allow him to complete the movie in postproduction.

But “Justice League” represents more than a one-off failure. It’s a repudiation of the mind-set that the shared-universe film, in which characters play off and feed interest in one another for future installments, can work for DC like it has for Marvel.

One factor may be tone. Marvel has long ago found a successful formula, a kind of big-stake jokiness that manages to keep its movies just serious enough. DC films have not succeeded in finding find that; if there’s a go-to mode it’s the effects-heavy grimness of the “Batman” and “Superman” movies, which has proved far less popular. “Justice League” was perhaps the most mixed bag in that regard: the banging seriousness of Snyder with the lighter touch of Joss Whedon, the “Avengers” director hired to finish the movie after Snyder left.

But the larger issue may be who’s at the helm of these films and what they do with that authority. Under longtime studio chief Kevin Feige (and, in recent years, also as part of the Disney empire), Marvel has been a tightly run operation, creating just enough latitude for filmmakers without letting them forget whose ship they’re really piloting. Filmmakers such as Anthony and Joe Russo, Whedon, Jon Favreau and James Gunn have all added some flourishes of their own, but their movies have been distinctly of a Feige-ian piece. It’s a well-oiled machine that just happens to be made up of disparate parts.

DC has struggled repeatedly to find the right guiding hand. The most recent attempt came when, after a shaky performance by “Batman V Superman” last year, executives put DC comics veteran Geoff Johns in charge of the films, pairing him with WB veteran Jon Berg. The idea at the time was to get one smoothly humming machine moving in a single direction like that competitor down the road in Burbank. “With Berg and Johns, Warner Bros. is attempting to unify the disparate elements of the DC movies with a seasoned film exec and a comics veteran that together hopefully can emulate the way Marvel Studios has produced its films under the vision of president Kevin Feige,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter. Last weekend, that attempt to unify failed.


The studio could now go the opposite way. It could find directors who can override all the executive muddle — that is, DC could become less of a well-oiled machine and more of a handcrafted producer of stand-alone good movies by people empowered to do so. After all, the modern DC renaissance — indeed, the modern comic-book renaissance — began just this way.

Read more:

www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/11/20/why-justice-league-failed-and-where-dc-goes-from-here/?utm_term=.5bd7e002b4ca

[Deleted]

Simple: Hire the man who did the Dark Knight trilogy to direct and lead DC in their movies.

[Bornthrilla]

They kinda tried that already. Christopher Nolan was a producer on Man of Steel and BvS.

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