You want a dark tone, DC? Do the Bat-family. Really!

Interesting article from the occasionally-still-interesting io9 last week. Relevant snippets include:

[Based on the relative receptions of Superman Returns and Bat-Bale], WB decided the grounded and gritty take that worked for Batman would also work for all of DC’s superheroes, including Superman.
[...]
Marvel’s success with its cinematic universe was undeniable, culminating in the 2012 Avengers movie. Warner Bros. saw Marvel working through a 10-year plan for its superheroes and thought that was what they were missing. What they didn’t get was that Marvel’s plan hinged on making a bunch of different kinds of superhero movies and then teaming them up. (I.e., Iron Man wasn’t followed by trying to remake the exact same movie, with the exact same tone, just with a different hero.)
[...]
If Wonder Woman is received well, don’t suddenly decide to replicate it in every other movie. If they suddenly try to turn Aquaman and The Flash into World War I movies, we’ll know Warner Bros. is still not learning what they need to.

And this is the opportunity for me to build off my earlier post about some ideas for a Bat-family Cinematic Universe. (Note: as I'm now in the middle of re-reading No Man's Land for the first time in ten years, I've noticed that I got some details wrong in that post. Nothing too significant to warrant me actually changing it, but yes, Batman's reasons for kicking Huntress out of his club are different than the ones I gave, I know.)



First, I enjoy these sort of "how would you fix this" thought experiments. My favorite example: "It's 1970. OHMSS just came out and Lazenby has quit. The producers are putting you in charge of making sure that the early 70s Bonds aren't the debacles we all know and love to hate." And the answer is: "Move Heaven and Earth to convince Peter Hunt not to quit, get him in a room with Connery, bring Connery back if and only if he'll commit to three films. Otherwise just hire Roger Moore, make The Spy Who Loved Me to win back the crowd, and then, once the New James Bond is established, do your darker OHMSS-style pseudo-reboot (read: proper adaptation of Moonraker). Under no circumstances hire Tom Mankiewicz." That last part may be a bit unfair, but his name is on three of the worst Bonds ever made.

Second, allow me to point out the irony of the current DC/WB situation. They hired the guy who directed Watchmen to do their Cinematic Universe, and then they brought in Geoff Johns, the guy who wrote a comic explicitly blaming Watchmen for making comics so dark, to ride herd on him.

Well, if they want to keep your darker Bat-tone, you need to churn out Bat-films, and as I said before, there are plenty of stories in the Bat-family to mine.

As the only Justice League member without superpowers, Batman is kind of out of his element anyway: witness the climax of Audience v. Eisenberg: Dawn of Injustice where Bats has virtually nothing to contribute in the fight against Cave Troll 2.0. So what I'd actually do is basically carve Bats out of the Justice League - oh, have him in the JL films if you must because he's so damn popular, but he's basically the Hawkeye compared to everybody else and hey brainwashing Batman to be the bad guy's minion would actually be terrifying because Batman's greatest asset is the fact that he's crazy-prepared for everything and he could tear the team apart pretty much the way Zemo did in Civil War.

Where was I? Right. Batman shouldn't show up in any films other than Bat-titles and JL titles. In fact, DC should develop essentially two franchises in parallel, with minimal Bat-crossover. io9's comment about turning Aquaman and The Flash into World War I movies is stoopid - the greatest danger facing WB vis a vis WW right now is them trying to do a Fake Ghostbusters-style marketing campaign, viz. "see this movie or you hate women!" The setting itself has little to do with the tone, and Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and The Flash should all be lighter and softer than any Bat-film.

Yes, having Bats turn up to fight is unrealistic, but these are movies about guys who wear their underpants outside their trousers. And anyway, you're aping Marvel, and the First Rule of Crossovers is "in any crossover, the villain shall be at least as ridiculous/fantastical as the most ridiculous/fantastical hero." You may think Ultron is an exception to this rule, and you're wrong, because half the plot of Ultron revolved around the Stupid Space Rocks that are going to be the McGuffins in Avengers 3: More Dumb Action.