The Justice League Movie: Potential treat, or impending train wreak.

This week DC entertainment announced that they have hired Will Beall to write a script for a Justice League movie. There are also rumblings of trying to get a new Wonder Woman movie going again, as well as Lobo and Suicide Squad movies. This really isn’t surprising. I imagine that with the Avengers currently sitting as the third highest grossing movie of all time that there is a lot of pressure to get the DC properties steaming along.

I can only imagine what DC entertainment president Diane Nelson has to deal with right now. The success of not just the Avengers, but the entire Marvel Cinema Universe highlights how much the DC properties not about Batman have struggled. The DC characters are very powerful and prominent intellectual properties, yet they have not be able to gain any traction.

I think the problem isn’t a hard one to figure out. It’s DC entertainment’s parent company, Warner Brothers.

Last August I looked at the Green Lantern movie in comparison to Captain America. Captain America was a movie that reveled in its comic book roots and yet remembered that it had to be an enthralling action movie for the general audience. Rather than dumb down the character for mass consumption Marvel made sure to build up Steve Rogers so that the movie going public would love him as much as the longtime fans.

Green Lantern by comparison was a stock summer block buster that had a generic action movie plot and Ryan Reynolds playing a character much like he has in most movies he has been in. In other words Warner Brothers was playing it safe. I have a feeling that the production of the movie was very influenced by focus groups.

The end result was a hit of Marvel and an underperformer for DC.

The point I am getting at is that Warner Brothers isn’t playing to the strengths of the DC properties. Marvel has made six movies that know full well they are action hero fantasies and instead of trying to bring their heroes into the real world they are trying to create a believable version of their superhero universe. Disney bought Marvel part way through this and made the wise decision to leave them alone as the plan is working.

Warner Brothers on the other hand does not seem to trust that the audience will embrace a theatric version of the DC universe. The words that keep getting thrown around are “Dark”, “Gritty”, and “Mature”. That works great for Batman as Christopher Nolan has shown, but not so much for Superman, or Wonder Woman.

If you don’t believe me on that point I suggest track down a copy of the recent Wonder Woman pilot. Instead of the strong but compassionate hero she was created to be, Wonder Woman was portrayed as a grim badass who would torture a bed ridden mook for information and straight up kill a security guard who got in her way. Basically she was unsympathetic and the show was terrible.

Not to say that this approach won’t work for all heroes, for example Green Arrow. There is a new Green Arrow series coming this fall that looks pretty good. It is going the darker route, but Green Arrow being a non-powered hero like Batman can make that work. But even this one seems to be victim to focus group shenanigans. The show and the hero in it are just being called Arrow. Apparently due to the failure of Green Lantern the word green is now taboo in a superhero name.

I have an idea that I would like to suggest to Warner Brothers. Bring on Bruce Timm for your film efforts. Timm was the driving force behind the DC animated universe that gave us Batman the animated series, Superman the animated series and Justice League unlimited. These were great and comic and non-comic fans alike loved them. Let Bruce write up some script treatments and whatever you do WB, do not let a focus group anywhere near them.

The Smallville Smackdown

This week it was announced that DC entertainment will release a weekly digital comic called Smallville Season 11.

I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.

Be thankful I haven’t launched the Fanboy News Network video series yet, I would have been yelling.

So why would I be yelling about a continuation of Smallville? Well let’s go over the reasons.

First, while I assume that if you read this blog you know what Smallville is, just in case you don’t here is the quick recap. The show is about the Life of Clark Kent between his freshman year in high school and his assuming the identity of Superman. It lasted 10 seasons. The mantra of the show was “No Flight, No Tights.”  

Ok on to the ranting.

Frist thing that springs to mind: Smallville already lasted five seasons too long. Seriously the idea was to show the events that lead Clark on the road to becoming the greatest hero of all time. The four seasons were ok. It was never stellar Television. It was Superman as seen through the lens of Dawson’s Creek. It had two things going for it, a sense of destiny as we know how the two main characters would turn out, and the performance of Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor.

Of course those early seasons had their issues too. Chief amongst them was the miscasting of Kristen Kreuk as Lana Lang. She had no chemistry with series lead Tom Welling. This would not have been so bad except that they cast Allison Mack as Chloe Sullivan, a character that had an unrequited crush on Clark. Mack had tons of chemistry with Welling, making Kreuk’s lack of it jarring.

The point here is that at the beginning you had an ok show that did surprisingly well in the ratings. And that may have been its curse. By season five the show had really run its course, but for CW it was doing great ratings so it was renewed. And they kept renewing it.

Maybe if the story had advanced it would not have been awful, but merely bad. But “No Flight, No Tights” meant they had to keep Clark as not quite Superman. What ended up happening was an amazing hack job of the Superman myth that made most fanboys rage. What was worst is that every now and then they actually had something good, like Geoff Johns love letter to the Golden Age with his JSA episodes. But mostly it was crap that went on five years past its expiration date.

The final season was particularly bad in that it started out like most Smallville seasons, but part way through someone in the writers’ room must have woken up.

“Oh crap, this is the last season, we should take the Clark Kent character we have developed and shoehorn him into personality from the comic books.”

I’m not kidding. It was the 9th episode of the 10^th season that Clark Kent started wearing glasses. And was the 13^th before he started with the mild mannered nerd persona. Like people who know him before would not figure out that the Clark Kent they knew for years was Superman.  I think it would ended up like being the Saturday Night Live Sketch with the Rock as Clark Kent where everyone know he was Superman and just humored him.

 A lot of this could have been forgiven, if they had nailed the series finale. If they gave us that rousing moment when Clark Kent became the Man of Steel and defeated the villain becoming the champion he was meant to be.

That would have been nice.

But Smallville had a history of unsatisfying season finales and I guess they saw no reason to make the series finally any different.

It was a two hour finale, and when Clark finally confronted the bad guy there were 14 minutes left in the episode. In that time the following happened:

·         He learned to fly

·         He defeated Darkseid, one of the most powerful entities in the DC Universe, by flying through him

·         He went to the Fortress of Solitude and got the Superman Costume.

·         He saved the airplane Lois Lane was on.

·         He flew in the sky and pushed a planet away from Earth.

·         Then there was an epilog.

And in none of that was there ever a clear shot of Tom Welling actually wearing the Superman costume. The rumor I keep hearing is that Welling, who was also a producer on the show, refused to wear it. I guess he felt that he should never fully been seen as Superman. What it did was leave the audience feeling cheated.

10 year build up with no pay off.

So now, I assume due to the success of the Buffy Season 8 and 9 comics DC feels they can give us this pay off.

I have an idea. If you want to see Clark Kent at the beginning of his career as Superman read the current run of Action Comics. At least they are going about it honestly.

For me the big mystery is why I watch that damn show for all ten seasons.

The only answer I can come up with is that I am such a comic fanboy that since It was something related to Superman thus I was obligated. 

Or maybe some part of me knew that one day I would write a geek culture blog and I would need to know the shows history to really tear into it.

I’m going with that last one. If makes me feel better.

DC Comics Relaunch Part 3

So far we have looked at how book sales and legal issues could be playing a part in the DC Comics’ relaunch. Now let’s look at another factor.

Intellectual Property.

In 2009 DC Comics’ parent company Warner Bros announced a corporate reorganization. They formed DC Entertainment Inc. The purpose was to have a division that had oversight on all the DC comic brand properties throughout the company.  The idea was to allow for better integration of the DC properties through the rest or WB’s divisions and promote them as media franchises.  Warner executive Diane Nelson was made President of DC Entertainment and DC Comics was moved under it as a subsidiary. In 2010 Geoff Johns, one of DC Comics’ top writers was made Chief Creative Officer of DC Entertainment, which basically meant it is his job to oversee the use of DC characters in other media to maintain their integrity.

On paper this looks great, DC now had a cohesive vision for its characters in other media and the authority to back it up. But all was not well

First you have Smallville, the teen angst version of Superman’s origins, that since 2001 had been steamrolling its way through DC continuity.

On the other end of the quality spectrum in 2005 and 2008 you have Christopher Nolan’s brilliant Batman movies. Wonderful films, but the realism that he injects, while making great cinema, do not lend themselves to integration into a greater superhero universe.

Add to that the pressure being put on by Marvel Studios. Marvel Studios is in the midst of a frankly  brilliant plan. They are creating a shared universe for their characters, giving the build up to the Avengers movie the feel of an all-star cast epic, but with actors they themselves have built up. So far all DC movies have been in their own little continuities.

Oh and their one entry into the Blockbuster sweepstakes this summer, Green Lantern, is met with a lukewarm greeting, While Thor is a smash and Captain America looks to be the movie to beat this season.

So DC Entertainment, despite having some of the most recognized intellectual properties in the world, can’t seem to get them out there in a big way. They need to get people talking about them again.

So how about resetting the universe they come from in the first place.

Not only can you generate press about the reboot, but you can use it to mold the stories into ones that will translate better into other media.

To back this theory up I look to one of the 52 titles launching in September, Resurrection Man. This is a character practically begging to be adapted into another media. Mitch Shelly is a man who wakes up one day in a shallow grave and suffering from partial amnesia. He comes to find that he has superpowers. His main power is resurrection, when he dies he quickly comes back to life, and as a bonus he has a random super power to boot. He is hunted by a shadowy organization that wants to study him. And the best part, he doesn’t wear spandex. His costume is jeans, t-shirt, a duster, and a wide brimmed hat. Seriously, cast Josh Holloway and you have a hit right there.

(To be fair I have always liked this character and plan to pick up the title myself, but I still stand by what I said.)

Next post I wrap up my thoughts on the relaunch and then we can move on to other subjects.