Quote:
Originally Posted by Vegita-San
the problem with the DC movies wasn't that they where not a carbon copy of the marvel formula. if they wanted to go darker, fine. but make them INTERESTING. ESB was darker than star wars, but it set up some interesting things and new characters and plots.
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To a person who actually reads comics, then they were very "interesting", in that they were far closer to the source material than any DC movies had ever attempted to be.
I'm aware that most of the audience for a movie doesn't read comics (most of them nowadays probably can't even read, period). But if seeing the material from print translated to film in a spiritually-faithful way is all you ever wanted to see, then those movies were very, very "interesting".
MoS, BvS, Wonder Woman and ZSJL remain the only DC movies that feel in any way like they were made by people who actually READ the comics and absorbed the material. Pretty much everything else before and since is from the Bryan Singer/Tim Burton school of "adaptation", where they simply look at covers for visual interpretation and make up whatever they feel like for the rest of it. Although the Green Lantern movie was actually super-faithful, too, but I digress.
"They weren't interesting" isn't what stalled them out. They simply weren't populist enough and came out at a time when people wanted safe, funny popcorn entertainment in their super-hero movies. Everything is cyclical in entertainment. If "Batman & Robin" had come out in 2016, it would've made two billion dollars. If "The Dark Knight" had come out in 2016, people would have called it "try-hard edgelord trash".
If you really go back and look at the entire history of these things over decades, what hits and what doesn't at any given time has very little to do with the products themselves, and a LOT to do with what the mainstream audience is in the mood for at any given time. WB/DC has
always fallen into a trap of doing dark and serious movies when people want light and fluffy, and doing light and fluffy when people want dark and serious.
Put simply, WB is not good at reading the room, and a lot of things they attempt are things that would've done great IF they'd come out figuratively "five minutes ago" and not Right Now.