It’s never easy to change the habits of a lifetime. We spend much of our existence watching the more outwardly successful members of our society and trying to shift our outlook subtly in order to be just a bit more like them. To exercise more; to eat less. To spend more time reading works of fine literature and watching cult movies; to spend less time on Facebook and reading the gossip pages or football transfer news. Yet we often find ourselves reverting to type, because these are the tiny vices that get us through the day.
Something similar seems to be happening in Hollywood right now when it comes to comic-book movies. Rival studios such as Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox have noted the hugely successful Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) model and would quite like their own piece of the pie. But try as they might, they cannot help but revert to older film-making models that have served them well in the past – and require rather less joined-up thinking.
The big geek news of the past week is that Warner, the studio behind the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) – launched in 2014 with the presumed aim of competing with Marvel’s MCU – has decided it might also be quite nice to begin making superhero movies that have absolutely nothing to do with the aforementioned series of interlinked films. Hence, we are hearing talk of a Joker origins movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio (and produced by Martin Scorsese), which will be entirely separate from the DCEU movies featuring Jared Leto (who must be absolutely chuffed to bits at the news) as the clown prince of Gotham.
In its latest piece on the studio’s plans, the Hollywood Reporter also quietly mentions that the upcoming Matt Reeves-directed outing The Batman may no longer star Ben Affleck as the caped crusader, and may also operate outside the DCEU with a different actor as the dark knight.
Let’s reflect on that bombshell for a second. You’ve just spent hundreds of millions of dollars setting up a shared universe for your much-heralded superheroes to inhabit, and your next move is to start making movies about the same characters that have nothing to do with the main saga. What explanation could there possibly be for such apparently muddled thinking? Will audiences not be enormously confused at the sight of Affleck playing Batman in the main DCEU, while another actor entirely pulls on the cape and cowl for solo outings?
Warner clearly feels far more comfortable making a standalone comic-book movie with an A-lister in the lead than it does with the considerably more troublesome Marvel format of a series of interlinked episodes featuring lesser-known stars. The studio has presumably noted the success of its recent film Wonder Woman, which was loosely linked to the main DC universe but took place in a different era entirely, and therefore did not have to worry itself overly about continuity with other films. The result was a much better picture than either of its previous DCEU episodes, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, whose directors both found themselves bogged down in a quagmire of clumsy episodic world-building.
Where Marvel somehow turns the need to remind us its properties are always part of a bigger picture into a story-cultivating element – the presence of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming always felt like an essential part of that movie’s coming-of-age theme, rather than an excuse to shoe-horn in the MCU’s biggest hitter – Warner struggles to achieve similar levels of synergy. It’s not the only rival studio with this problem. Fox’s little corner of the Marvel universe, containing the X-Men films, Deadpool and the Fantastic Four, has never been linked to the MCU. But the studio has also been strangely wary of building bridges between the properties it does own exclusive rights to: hence, we saw Professor X’s mansion in Deadpool, but there was no sign of the bald psychic himself in either his James McAvoy or Patrick Stewart mode. Moreover, those X-Men who did appear, Deadpool and Colossus, manifested in very different forms to those seen in the main saga.
Fox seems likely to begin building more synergy into its films with the advent of next year’s Deadpool 2, which will introduce the X-Force team from the comics. But the studio couldn’t resist giving Hugh Jackman his swan song as Wolverine in the almost completely standalone effort Logan, a movie that might just – at a major stretch – have taken place in the same universe as the main X-Men movies, but let’s face it, probably did not. Faced with the choice of a Wolverine movie linked to its ongoing efforts in the 1980s, or one based on director James Mangold’s desire for a sombre, dystopian comic-book take on Unforgiven, the studio simply couldn’t resist the latter.
Few would argue that this particular creative decision paid dividends. And the idea of an 80s-set, DiCaprio-led, Scorsese-produced origins tale for the Joker sounds just as tantalising. Likewise, a Batman freed from the alpha male, bully-boy nastiness tacked on to the caped crusader – purely because Warner needed us to believe in the idea of him trying to take down Superman in order to watch those box-office greenbacks rolling in – sounds like a breath of fresh air. Yet it’s also the easy option, rather than the one that might pay the richest long-term dividends for Hollywood in terms of radical self-improvement.
Moreover, I can’t help thinking that the more studios succumb to the desire to revert to form, to take the easy option of the short-term dopamine rush of old-school, single-movie film-making, the less likely they are to make a success of the multiple-episode format that has proven so lucrative to Marvel. At a time when Hollywood is struggling to persuade us to switch off our TVs and head out to catch a movie, we surely need film-makers who really care about the big-screen visions they are presenting us with. If there is no genuine desire to build a working cinematic universe for any of these rival superhero properties, then the question begs itself: why bother?
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