Warner/DC Feature Plans From 2022 Onwards (Theatrical and HBO Max)

[ZariusTwo]

Current plan is, from 2022 onwards, there could be up to four theatrical DC movies per year, and two movies exclusive to HBO Max per year

https://www.cbr.com/dc-films-theater...se-plans-2022/

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

Originally Posted by ZariusTwo

Current plan is, from 2022 onwards, there could be up to four theatrical DC movies per year, and two movies exclusive to HBO Max per year

https://www.cbr.com/dc-films-theater...se-plans-2022/

Uh huh. Sure. Six a year. Yup.

[Leo656]

I know. Given the fact that they're not gonna have any money left pretty soon I don't even think "Flashpoint" is coming out. All those stupid cameos are bound to be expensive, after all. You just know that they'd have put "The Batman" on pause too if they hadn't already shot like a third of it.

All these studios tripping over themselves to announce future plans, none of which are ever going to happen thanks to the pandemic gutting the movie industry. It's embarrassing. Maybe a few of the scripts they had floating around will get retrofitted into lower-budget web series or something. But NONE of those movies are likely coming out. Especially not after WW84 blew up on the launchpad.

Like, I know that a lot of this is all just posturing for the stockholders, and I get that. "Everything is fine! No, BETTER than fine! Better than EVER, really! Look, see, we have ALL this stuff coming out... we swear!" But it's annoying since you know they're absolutely lying.

[IMJ]

Isn't 6 movies essentially the entire DCEU after all these years already? Maybe 7?

[Leo656]

In order:

- Man of Steel
- BvS
- Suicide Squad
- Wonder Woman
- Justice League
- Aquaman
- Shazam!
- Birds of Prey
- Wonder Woman 1984

...So 9. Which actually ain't too bad, in and of itself. And we'd only have about 4 or 5 more if the once-promised JL2, The Batman (with Affleck), Flash, Green Lantern Corps, and Cyborg movies had all materialized on-schedule, but to be fair MOST people were highly skeptical of the latter two EVER coming out to begin with. Only the first three ever looked super-likely to materialize.

Obviously it's a far drop from the MCU and their 87 movies, but one could argue that at least 2/3s of those are padding and filler, anyway, and when you trim it down to just the relevant or "must see" movies, you're left with about the same number as what's in the DCEU catalog. And for better or worse, it's not like any other attempt at a "shared universe" of movies made it even half that far. Unless you insist on counting the Wolverine and Deadpool movies as part of the "X-Men Cinematic Universe", which... I guess? But that's about it.

But yeah, for all their bravado and bluster and financial success, even Disney/Marvel never shot off their mouths about doing SIX goddamn movies a year, and that was BEFORE the pandemic. No way WB ever, EVER puts out more than three DC movies a year, that simply isn't going to happen.

They talk too much, and that's why everyone thinks they're stupid. Because they talk too much and they say stupid things.

[IMJ]

Oh. My bad....

9 films since 2013. 9 in 7.5 years, but now they are going to churn out 6 a year.
Maybe they are going to count each episode of the Snyder cut as a film?

Well... all sarcasm aside, I hope they do it. There is a lot more of the DCU I'd like to see on film.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by IMJ

9 films since 2013. 9 in 7.5 years, but now they are going to churn out 6 a year.

Nope!

2 a year? Reasonable, but still unlikely given WB's piss-poor track record as far as planning and execution. 3 a year? Now we're pushing it, but still possible if we accept as a certainty that 1 or 2 of those will absolutely be rushed junk slapped together for the sake of More Product.

4 or more per year? Never, ever, ever, EVER happen. Not even if WB erases every single thing except DC movies from its production slate. Not even a chance that they go "2 and 2" between theatrical and HBO Max, rather than 4 and 2 like they say. They do not have the resources OR the management necessary to crank out 4-to-6 DC movies per year. Not even if they just give up completely on quality across the board and just start cranking things out to generate content knowing full well that they're crap.

I mean, it's just mathematically impossible. Don't believe me? WELL, let's see what Professor Steiner says about those projections:



"You know they say that movie studios are created equal, but you look at WB and you look at everybody else, and you can see that statement is not true! See, normally if you go one on one with another studio, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But Disney's a genetic freak, and they're not normal! So WB got a 25%, AT BEST, at beatin' 'em. Then you add COVID-19 to the mix, your chances of winning drastic (sic) go down. See, in 2022, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winning, but Disney, they got a 66 and 2/3 chance of winning, because WB KNOWS they can't figger out Green Lantern Corps and they're not even gonna try!

So WB, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25% chance, and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winnin' in 2022. But then you take Disney's 75% chance of winning, if they was to go one-on-one, and then add 66 2/3 percents thanks to COVID, an' Disney got 141 2/3 chance of winning in 2022. See WB, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you in 2022!"

....Allllllright, I'll just take your word for that. Not entirely what I asked, but the math probably checks out. Any last words for us, Scotty? What'd you think of "Wonder Woman 1984"?


Well... I guess I should've expected that, considering who I'm asking.

[Coola Yagami]

I don't believe it. It's just more of WB's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. They're just so stupid and reactionary, they don't know how to stick to their guns.

They saw Avengers money so they skipped MoS2 to what would become BVS.

They saw GOTG money so they re-shot Suicide Squad to make it 'funnier'.

The whole JL re-shoot and Snyder cut fiasco.

For a while we had all these potential Joker movies coming out, thank god we only got the one.

After Joker was a success they started talking 'let's do a Two-Face origin movie and whoever else'.

I'm just waiting around at this point, I assume if the crowd response is positive, they'll later announce 3 movies per year and if the crowd response is dead they'll either quietly kill it or just say one big movie a year.

[AquaParade]

In fact, "they" are so reactionary, "they" even replaced themselves.

The "they" we speak of in terms of WB has shifted dramatically. It's hard to shake a reputation, but we should at least be aware that they same people who were in charge 5 years ago are long gone. All studios chase trends and throw things at the wall to see what sticks - that is how you see what works. Even the MCU chases trends. I don't mind as long as a handful of them are good, or even great, every several years.

[Leo656]

It's why I genuinely don't understand all the overreaction and hyper-analyzing of this type of "news" announcement. Like yeah, it's particularly bad coming from WB, but you see it all the time no matter who it is.

Someone says Something. Then "Something" becomes a headline. Then that headline gets picked up and repeated by a thousand other sources. Then all the Comments sections and reaction videos and hyperbolic reactions and conspiracy theories and on and on and ON.

And in the end, it's usually Nothing. Vaporware. And thus, all those words and all that energy was a big waste of time.

We all partake in and perpetuate it, but... it's really quite stupid if we're being honest.

"Someone said Something." Okay? "They" say lots of things. Might as well save any strong emotional investment until we have something "in our hands", so to speak.

I just get so annoyed whenever I see the same "news" being repeated a thousand times when there's a 0% chance of it actually coming to pass. WB has as much chance of releasing 6 DC movies a year as I do of f*cking Stephanie McMahon. Therefore, it's not "news." It's bluster at best, boldfaced lies at worst.

[Coola Yagami]

Originally Posted by Leo656

It's why I genuinely don't understand all the overreaction and hyper-analyzing of this type of "news" announcement. Like yeah, it's particularly bad coming from WB, but you see it all the time no matter who it is.

Someone says Something. Then "Something" becomes a headline. Then that headline gets picked up and repeated by a thousand other sources. Then all the Comments sections and reaction videos and hyperbolic reactions and conspiracy theories and on and on and ON.

And in the end, it's usually Nothing. Vaporware. And thus, all those words and all that energy was a big waste of time.

We all partake in and perpetuate it, but... it's really quite stupid if we're being honest.

"Someone said Something." Okay? "They" say lots of things. Might as well save any strong emotional investment until we have something "in our hands", so to speak.

I just get so annoyed whenever I see the same "news" being repeated a thousand times when there's a 0% chance of it actually coming to pass. WB has as much chance of releasing 6 DC movies a year as I do of f*cking Stephanie McMahon. Therefore, it's not "news." It's bluster at best, boldfaced lies at worst.

Not to toot my own horn (though I guess it kinda is) that's mostly why I barely ever do a 'OMG THIS JUST HAPPENED!!11111' video until I actually see some photos or a trailer or something.

I think the only video I ever jumped the gun on was when it was first announced that Fitchner was gonna be Shredder until it was later changed and revealed that was changed last minute.

[Leo656]

Even in the very unlikely event that they managed to make 6 DC movies a year, most of them would just be Batman spin-offs and Harley Quinn movies and I'm really not in the mood for that.

Although an HBO Max series featuring Lobo or The Question would be really f*cking neato.

Come to think of it, with so many DC characters left "untouched" in live action, most of whom don't deserve/can't carry a solo film but would still be interesting to see explored, y'know what I would do? I'd borrow a concept from the comics and create a "DC Showcase" series for HBO Max, with each episode featuring an adventure from a different DC character. You could cover a lot of ground very quickly that way and do it all very cost-effectively. You could also easily tie it in with the mainstream movies - or not - but if you did that it would do a lot of the work in establishing the "connective tissue" that some people claim wasn't set up properly in the movies themselves.

I mean, I can name 50 DC characters/stories that don't necessarily deserve a movie but would be awesome to explore within a one-hour episode of a live-action series. And obviously if a character proved popular enough they could be brought back. But that was the whole point of "Showcase" in the comic books back in the 1990s; not everyone deserved their own book or mini-series, but you still got to do cool stories with them and in some cases they DID get their own book later on. Point of fact, Supergirl was a fairly dormant character at one point in the early-90s, but the reaction to her Showcase issue was so strong that DC ended up giving her a mini-series and then later an ongoing.

It'd be a great way to unload some of the ideas they've been kicking around for years but are stuck in Development Hell, too. Again, like "Lobo"; even Keith Giffen says that an actual Lobo movie would almost certainly be awful, but maybe it would work better in this context? They've been trying to adapt "Death: The High Cost of Living" for over 25 years and they're no closer to getting it done than when they started; maybe try doing it this way, since it almost certainly wouldn't be a big theatrical draw but still deserves a shot in live-action. How about the Metal Men? Again, not a great concept for a movie, but they're fun. What about Cain and Able, and the Houses of Secrets and Mystery? That could be a fun "Tales From The Crypt"-style episode.

That's what I would do. F*ck trying to rush out a bunch of big-budget movies, 75% of which are just going to not get made and subsequently end up at the bottom of a drawer for lack of budget or interest. The DCU is huge, but a lot of its charm is in the "smaller" stories and more obscure characters. When you're preoccupied with selling tickets and hitting a $1 billion gross, you can't explore that stuff. But the streaming platform is tailor-made for that kind of thing, and you never know... some of those ideas done "small-scale" can be spun out into actual movies later if they get a great reaction. And the ones that don't get a great reaction... so what? It's an hour gone, hopefully the next one plays better, no harm no foul. If the episode with The Creeper didn't take, maybe the one next week with Etrigan the Demon will. And so on and so forth.

This is what they SHOULD be doing. A "DC Showcase" series. Not "instead" of actual movies, but in-between and alongside of. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that it would be the best possible use of their resources. Especially since they're going to have no choice but to scale back on the movie projects until the economy and the movie industry shows signs of recovery.

They'll never do it, of course, because they're idiots. But it would be huge.

[IMJ]

Anything to gas it up and do something interesting just to get the engine moving again. I've never loved DC the way I love Marvel stuff - not in 30 odd years of collecting. But there is a lot of promise for good DC on film. A Zach Snyder Batman movie would've been amazing - why on Earth did he do Superman?!?

Do some bold $#!(...

-At this point I would be excited if they retconned the Jonah Hex, Watchmen and Green Lantern flicks into the DCEU.
-A bright Superman movie with more than heavy lifting with Cavill would be great.
-Take what they did with GL and refine and improve on it.
-Make Wonder Woman the true backbone of the Universe - it would be an interesting change of role types.

They need to just plow forward. I'm actually really looking for to Justice League again.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by IMJ

A Zach Snyder Batman movie would've been amazing - why on Earth did he do Superman?!?

This most likely wasn't an Essay Question, but I'm gonna make it one.

Short Answer: Because he read a lot of Superman comics and had a different direction for executing the character than just ripping off the Donner movies, which is all anyone else seems interested in doing.

Long Answer:

As "elitist" as it sounds the simple fact is that most of the people who felt his Superman take was "off" haven't read the comics backwards-and-forwards the way I have, and wouldn't recognize what's being borrowed from both plot-wise and/or thematically. And he really did do a great job of taking bits of everything from 1938 up through more modern era and tying it all together. He did more work in that regard than anyone else ever has with ANY comic book movie character, quite frankly. Again, people say "it's not faithful" based on their own criteria, but if you recognize what's in front of you then it's arguably the MOST faithful take that's ever been done.

This is not the case for very individual, but what I find the most in talking to people who didn't like it, was that they have a strong preference for either Donner Superman or the animated Justice League Superman... neither of which were quite right. Sure, they're more "familiar", and the animated one comes a lot closer to the mark than Donner's - which I've lost a lot of patience for over the years - but in both cases one thing I don't like is that they pretty much just have him come out of the box "Perfected" the second he puts his cape on for the first time, and that skips over, like, ALL of his actual character development. Which is why people often say he's boring/one-dimensional/etc.

The best thing Snyder did was sadly the thing everyone hates the most about his take because they either don't get it or don't have the patience for sitting though it: He actually did Year One Superman, who nobody's ever bothered adapting before. He decided to flesh out the concept of a guy suddenly being handed the single hardest job in the entire world and being thrown into the deep end of it with no manual and being forced to figure that sh*t out on the fly, and what the repercussions and consequences of all that would be, not only to himself but to the world around him. To realistically explore the very real idea that if Superman were real he'd be the single most important figure on a global scale since Jesus Christ, and that his emergence would be a world-changing event for both good AND bad reasons. And most importantly to the character himself, that he has to learn and make mistakes in order to grow as a person and as a hero but that he doesn't have the luxury of doing so "quietly".

In short, he decided that the most interesting thing to do with the character would be to show him actually learning how to BE Superman and have him gradually grow into the more familiar version of the character everyone knows over a series of films, rather than be "fully-formed" as "Santa Claus With A Cape" 35 minutes into the first movie, which it turns out is what everyone expected/demanded. I, myself, have seen that take a hundred times going back to the George Reeves TV series, and I'm sick of it. The comics always explore the first few years of the character's activity in much the same way and to much the same effect of the Snyder films, and they're always some of the more interesting stories with the character.

Pretty much every single thing people felt "off" about with the character in MoS and BvS can be better-understood by just accepting that "It's Year One Superman". People talk about all the collateral damage in MoS and forget that the movie explicitly tells you more than once that the guy's never even been in a fight before and hardly ever used his powers to any real effect. People get annoyed by the fact that he's so reckless and violent and has a temper, when the comics ALWAYS show him being a reckless, cocky, "bull-in-a-china-shop" during his early years. People wanted Big Dramatic Speeches about "Truth, Justice and the American Way" when in nearly EVERY version of the character that's ever been done on Year One, he didn't DO that during his Prototype Phase. Point of fact, if you look at the Fleischer cartoons (which were another big influence on Zack's take), "Superman" almost never says a word when he's "in-character", he just shows up, does the job, then leaves. People get frustrated by the act that HE'S frustrated in BvS, ignoring the point where the movie stops and has someone explicitly say, "Maybe he's just a guy trying to do the right thing", meanwhile the government wants to censure him, Batman wants to kill him and people are literally burning him in effigy because he's an "alien invader"; like f*ck, man, is he not allowed to have human emotions? Oh wait, of course not; "He's Superman". People were intensely aggravated because there was so much angst about people not trusting him and him in turn having to try and "win them over" through his actions and deeds, once again ignoring that 1. That's exactly what would/should happen if a flying man who can shoot lasers out of his eyes and bench-press a planet suddenly just "appeared" with no explanation; WE know he's the Good Guy, the in-universe characters DON'T, and 2. This is the way the comics have ALWAYS done it; there's ALWAYS an initial period of most people in-universe being wary of or even flat-out hostile towards Superman, until he goes out of his way to PROVE that the only reason he's here is to help people, usually through some rather extreme example (in this case literally dying to prove it, even though "You don't owe this world a thing; you never did" - clearly HE himself didn't agree with that sentiment).

Basically, Zack just said "I wanna do Year One Superman, I think that's a really great angle for the character that's never been done on film before." And as it turns out, most people simply didn't have the patience to watch him "learn how to be Superman" over a period of movies and go through all of the "growing pains"; they wanted him to immediately walk out with the suit on and suddenly be all-knowing and all-perfect, because that's what they're familiar with from cartoons and old movies. Even though that immediately sacrifices ALL of his character development and also just plain isn't in any way realistic.

But AS "Year One Superman" goes, it was pretty well perfect. I mean there's nothing, absolutely NOTHING about the character Zack wrote that isn't pulled directly from the comics, going all the way back to the very beginning of how the character was portrayed. Most of the things people said they feel "off" about were 100% End User Problems. And they're entitled to their opinion, but they're not allowed to lie. People can SAY, "That's not a proper and valid interpretation of the Superman character" if they want to... but they're absolutely lying. And that annoys me.
------------

So... that's the very long answer to your question.

I agree that he also did a very, very good Batman, though. Easily my favorite so far.

In viewing his work and reading a lot of what Zack has said about both of the characters, I often get the strong feeling that we both relate to them similarly. Such as, he and I like both Superman and Batman a hell of a lot but ultimately lean towards Superman because we recognize that ultimately he's a better person because his heroism comes from a place of genuine altruism and a will to do good, rather than acting out and "getting even" with the world's injustice due to trauma. Which in turn informs why his Superman persists in doing what he knows is right even when people outright tell him "No, Stop That", and why his Batman is kind of an asshole; because Superman's heroism comes from a genuinely selfless place and Batman's from a more (but not altogether) selfish one.

And I think that since he and I see the characters similarly - and further, that I've read and therefore recognize a lot of the specific source material being pulled from for the movies themselves with regard to both the Superman and Batman characters - is why I get a lot more out of them than most people do. There's been plenty of takes on either character that I've enjoyed quite a lot, but none so much as what he put together.

As far as what Zack would have done with more Batman, though... Christ. Him and Affleck doing "Batman: Venom" and "The Last Arkham"... we will NEVER get a Batman movie as perfect as those two would have been, and nobody would ever have executed them better. That would have been absolutely amazing.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by IMJ

-Make Wonder Woman the true backbone of the Universe - it would be an interesting change of role types.

She's not that, though. It's Superman. Everything Comes From Superman with regard to the DCU, both in-fiction and meta-fictionally. This was another thing Zack went to great lengths to point out, that pretty much everything in the world revolves around this One Guy, because this One Guy is so important just by his very existence. Others like Batman and Wonder Woman are also important, but they simply aren't AS important. In "real life", Superman crystalized the very idea of the "super-hero" as we know it; within the fiction, he's the one who inspired all the other heroes to step into the light. In either case, Real World or Meta-Fiction, you simply don't HAVE a DC Universe without Superman. Thus, he's the centerpiece everything revolves around.

That doesn't change even when someone else's movie occasionally makes more money.

Not to mention, Diana as a character is very wishy-washy and spends altogether too much time trying to "find herself" or figure out what her "role" is. As we've seen from people's reaction to Clark in MoS and BvS, people have very little patience for that stuff. But when every third or fourth arc of the character in the comics is called "Who IS Wonder Woman?", and she bounces back and forth from "Peace and Love Hippie" to "Bloodthirsty Amazon" depending on the day and the writer... yeah. She's just not very consistent or well-written. There's never been any version of the character who's "defined" enough to be the "backbone" of ANYTHING.

I mean, I'd argue that the movies "get it right" with her more than a lot of the comics ever have. But even within the context of those movies, as I've said elsewhere we're now at a point where her defining trait seems to be "Got Laid Once, Misses The Guy, Can't Get Over It." It's fixable, but the sequel really shot a lot of holes in her character, to the point where a sequel is going to have some work to do in getting her back on track.

I like Wonder Woman. But yeah, neither in print nor on film does she need to be the centerpiece of anything. By definition, she's always kind of a flake. Although Gal portrays her very well. I can see the logic of your suggestion insofar as, "Well, her first movie made a lot of money and was better-received by general audiences than Superman and Batman were", but still... nah.
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Semi-related note, though... Connie Nielsen (Queen Hippolyta) seems very excited for "Justice League" and the restoration of a bunch of Amazon-related stuff:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/he...-directors-cut

“Zack had already called me to ask if I would be OK with a reissue of the film with changes. And I asked him, ‘Well, will you bring back the Amazon chapter the way you had written it and had filmed it?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely,’ Nielsen shares. “And then I said, ‘And Zack, will you also bring back my quite incredible stunt, running up the walls?’ And he said, ‘You got it.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, definitely. You’ve got my blessing. Absolutely.’”

Nielsen is also opening up about the reasons why she believes the theatrical cut of Justice League (2017) failed to connect with audiences.

“What was really sad was how much stuff we filmed that wasn’t in the film,” she recalls. “And I think that’s part of what made Justice League (2017) less cohesive as a viewing experience. The intent was not the same during the editing as it was during shooting.”

"I don’t think that other director (Joss Whedon) was that interested in the Amazons. I would have to assume that."

Awesome. Can't wait.

I'd even be down for an entire movie about just the Amazons, with no Wonder Woman, like a Prequel movie or something. That'd be awesome.