DC Superheroes in Film (Theatrical and Streaming) (Page 8 of 19)

I wonder if they could've done something sorta revolutionary and make it into a miniseries of sorts.  Distribute it themselves on their own website.  Then it could've been 4 hours, and people could watch it in episodes. 

I have no idea what it would cost to make that work financially, though.  $20 a viewing?  More?

If they streamed it on their own site, it would probably not make much. They would have to partner with a service to make it work. Even Amazon or Hulu would be iffy. Netflix could work, but they already partner with Marvel.

Nah, they're probably better off the way they did it.

Releasing a bunch of versions of movies hasn't hurt Star Wars.

I do think that they need to just release one version, and they need to stop thinking that they can create better product than the writers and directors. You can't just pull things out without making a dent.

Now, when it comes to Suicide Squad, I'm not sure if the extended cut really changes anything yet, but I didn't think that there was much missing from the theatrical version.

I've always expected the Joker stuff to be a bunch of over-hyped nonsense. Jared Leto probably spent hours being all "method" in front of the camera, and they chose what they needed to make the movie work.

I'm sure that there are deleted scenes that were story points at some point, but it was probably edited in a way that built up Harley, rather than the Joker.

I could be wrong, but I think that people are expecting way too much from this Joker footage.

I mean, I'm sure that it could happen that way... But it's also possible that the people making the trailer just got access to footage before the film was fully edited and there is no cut with them in there. I've seen that happen with other movies.

Suicide Squad is a good example, because almost immediately word got out that Jared Leto's role was basically evaporated in the editing room.  This angered a lot of prospective movie goers.  Also, I kind of feel "cheated" by these things.  It's one thing to be Ridley Scott, who always seems to have a "director's cut," because I feel like his movies are complete as they are.  In many cases, they are his own edits, not the studio meddling.  Even as good a movie as Rogue One is, you hear about all these reshoots and edits, and wonder what it looked like originally?  Personally I hope we DON'T see those, because I just feel like those weren't the movie.  George Lucas butchered his films multiple times over.

http://www.superherohype.com/news/38829 … isnt-great

Sounds like Affleck wants to knock this one out of the park, and he's not going to let DC screw with it the way they've seemingly screwed with other projects.  Good for him....he's been the best part of the DCCU (surprising everyone, including me).

http://www.superherohype.com/news/38958 … e#/slide/1

Left without comment.

I've been worried all season that they're going to kill off Barry and make Wally the star.

A movie signed a director who then left, then signed a replacement who then left, then has its existing screenplay thrown out in favour of starting over -- that is a movie that is clearly suffering severely from (a) a studio that keeps retooling the product without a clear direction (b) a studio that's incapable of finding a director willing or able to realize that vision and (c) a studio without any confidence in a product and without any idea what that product even is.

MAN OF STEEL had a pretty clear vision of presenting a more physical, visceral Superman. BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN DAWN OF JUSTICE (dear God, that title) and SUICIDE SQUAD, however, seem to suffer from severe second-guessing and cold feelt; BVSDOJ (that title!) and SS were both ambitious films with passionate directors who turned in a final cut -- and then the studio abruptly hacked up both movies. BVSDOJ was re-edited to make it as short as possible, slicing out Superman's character arc and rendering the film incoherent. SS was reshot and re-edited so clumsily that the scene to scene progression of the film is even more nonsensical than the theatrical cut of BVSDOJ.

In both cases, there was a perfectly good movie in the edit bay that was sent to theatres literally cut to ribbons and now it seems to be happening to THE FLASH before it's even begun to film -- except, of course, we have no way of knowing if THE FLASH was ever good or not.

This is why I'm been preaching that DC needs someone overseeing all of this stuff.  Not because the Marvel way is the best way but because there seems to be so many arms reaching into the pot on this.

Right now, Marvel has a plan.  It's a plan that Informant hates, but Marvel movies feel like Marvel movies.  Somehow, Ant-Man feels like it's in the same universe as Thor and the same universe as Guardians.  The only questions about Marvel are which movies come next.

DC, whether you like the movies or not, is a mess.  There's been almost no buzz on Wonder Woman, which is weird because the trailers were largely very positive.  There's now talk of DC doing a Black Adam solo movie along with a Shazam movie because they hired a star to play the villain before they hired a hero (who will, no matter what, be a bigger star than the hero).  I've heard more details on the Green Lantern Corps movie than the Aquaman movie (and one is in production and the other isn't supposed to come out until 2020).

They need to answer a question - is Zach Snyder's vision for the universe what they want, or do they need to make a change?  Because everything they're doing seems reactionary.  Man of Steel was good but had flaws so they tried to cover up those flaws and throw in Batman.  But then people were so excited about Batman that they turned the Man of Steel sequel into a Batman movie.  Then people hated that.  So they took a dark movie about villains and tried to make it funny and bright, but then that movie didn't make sense.  So they are trying to make Justice League more fun.  It wouldn't surprise me if reactions to all-black Superman made them do massive re-edits and re-shoots to have Justice League primarily take place in the Kryptonian afterlife.  Life Superman meets Contact.

To their credit, they haven't fired Snyder.  And they seem willing, at first, to let directors do their own thing (which Marvel doesn't really do - they allow directors to color the way they want as long as they color within Marvel's lines).  But if they want to do the joint universe thing, they need the universe to live by a set of rules.  Otherwise, it's not a universe at all.

That's the thing.  Giving directors the freedom to make their version of something is great, but the studio is meddling too much.  I still haven't seen BvS extended edition (nor the one for Suicide Squad), but apparently the BvS one is better.  So it doesn't matter if they're letting directors make their own movies if the studio is going to hack them up.

That is one reason to have a Kevin Feige role.  Someone to defend movies against the studio, if nothing else.

Okay, but I don't even think we're talking about a quality issue.  Take the Marvel quality completely out of it.  What Marvel has is a singular person at the top who is protecting the brand.  If Disney had wanted to edit Captain America mostly out of Civil War because people loved Iron Man, it would be Kevin Feige's job to make sure that didn't happen.  No one was there to do that for Batman/Superman, and it ended up, frankly, making Superman's character look terrible.  If the extended cut had been released, maybe there wouldn't be so much hate for the character, and there'd be more buzz for the universe.

And again, if the studio isn't meddling, directors can make their own movies.  Aquaman can be Aquaman instead of DC Cinematic Universe Episode 6.

I think part of the problem with Warner Bros is that they are way too reactionary.  So instead of following a roadmap (like Marvel is doing), they keep reacting and changing the plan.  Is the universe supposed to be gritty and realistic?  Is it supposed to be a dark examination on what it's like to be a hero?  Are we okay with people dying or not? 

And the problem is that I don't think anyone's sat down and analyzed the rules of this universe.  Man of Steel didn't make any indication that any superhumans existed.  And, yet, we now know that Batman had been around for a long time when Clark was growing up.  We know that Crocodile men exist.  That the US military was assisted by a magical Amazon goddess in World War I.  A costumed hero shouldn't have been as big of a deal as it was.

Then there's Batman.  We're led to believe that Batman is well known and has had most of his career.  But Clark refers to him as "this bat vigilante in Gotham" - it makes him sound like Knox in Batman '89 where Batman has *just started* and no one knows who he is?  He'd already been driving his tank around at least two US cities....people would know who he was.

If DC wants to go against the grain, fine.  If they want their movies to be connected in a universe but otherwise separate, that's great.  But if it's a universe, the universe has to make sense.  And they currently have three movies that feel like they're in very different worlds.  And BvS doesn't even seem to make sense from scene to scene because that world is so confusing.  Not to mention, we have three movies and the only likeable protagonists are the bad guys in Suicide Squad

Okay, but you can think Kevin Feige does a bad job and still use that model.  That's like saying that Avatar is a bad movie so movies shouldn't have directors.

I think Suicide Squad implies that Batman is very-well known.  He's not working in the shadows...he's openly driving down a major street in a gigantic Batmobile.  No one is freaking out about it so it must be something that has happened before.  Harley Quinn was arrested, partly, for the murder of Robin.  She's not arrested for "the murder of Jason Todd" - it's Robin.  So Robin must be known by local police.  I mean, heck, Deadshot's daughter moves to protect Batman.  She's a child, and she knows enough about Batman to know that he's a) a man and b) a good guy.  If Batman isn't known, wouldn't she want her father to try and protect her from this creepy Bat monster?

The problem is that Batman is Batman when it serves the story and he's obscure when it serves the story.  When they're making Suicide Squad, they needed someone to say "wait, Clark Kent doesn't even know who Batman is, and he's a reporter in the city across the river.  Shouldn't he be working more in the shadows?"  Instead, the films are filmed completely separately, causing continuity errors across the movies.  So Clark just looks like an idiot for not knowing the vigilante who's been active in Gotham for 15-20 years.

Haha, forget about Marvel then.  The model I'm talking about is the "way any large organization works" - which is to say

                      Guy at the top
                     /          |        \
               Part 1    Part 2    Part 3

Someone needs to be in charge of everything - either deflecting studio interference or making sure the movies follow some sort of cohesive plan.  Otherwise, you go with the "X-Men model" of several movies all contradicting each other.  X-Men, in my opinion, is what can happen when you have too many cooks.  You end up with a collection of odd, incoherent movies that are only tied together by their association with each other.

I don't really care if they tie these movies together.  As far as I'm concerned, they can all be separate movies and then join for a Justice League movie.  The problem is that *they* seem to want to do it as a joined universe, with Flash having two cameos so far and Batman appearing in both Suicide Squad and (allegedly) Wonder Woman.  So as long as they are going to do connections from movie, I'd hope that someone is making sure that there aren't wild contradictions from movie to movie.

That's all I'm saying.

Right. But we are assuming that this didn't exist with DC movies, when there were probably a number of people involved in making the movies work together. I know you think their system (whatever it was) failed, but I haven't seen any major flaws or continuity errors so far.

Basically what I'm saying is, I don't know what their system is, but there doesn't seem to be a problem so far.

Watched the extended cut of Suicide Squad. Overall, it doesn't change the film. Most of the changes were typical cuts of a line here or a moment there. Some scenes get to breathe a little more, but this isn't like BvS where the cut completely changes the angle of the movie.

The Joker/Harley relationship got a little bit more time. Harley was still the star, but there were some new beats in there.

Better than that was a little more material with Harley getting into the other squad members' heads, showing her psychiatrist background and proving that she isn't just crazy. She had a little bit more depth here.

There was other stuff, but as I said, this isn't like the BvS situation. There is no new storyline. No Slipknot intro, unfortunately. I could swear that the part where the Joker pushes Harley out of the helicopter was slightly different, but I may be misremembering the theatrical version.

Hmmmm....I think that's really it.  I haven't seen either extended version, but if you're right, both movies would've benefited from being released with their "true" versions.  And that's a studio problem.  Snyder made the movie that he wanted, and it was butchered.  Ayer made the movie he wanted, and it was butchered.

That's why I'd like someone to work to protect the integrity of these projects.  Snyder couldn't do it.  Ayer couldn't do it.  Whether you like the movies or not, the Marvel movies are what they are.  You don't have to wait to buy an extended edition of Civil War to understand why Peter is at the airport battle.  You don't have to buy a Black Panther edition because he was edited out of the final film. 

I just think DC suffers from a lack of planning.  They're the studio equivalent of starting to film a script before it's complete.  If you look at Marvel, they have their ducks in a row.  There's a roadmap of what movies are coming, when, and how they'll tie together.  Their "phases" build to something, and they tie together in ways that are easy to understand.

DC's future slate is a mess because their plan is reactionary.  There's Wonder Woman and Justice League.  Aquaman is in preproduction.  Will there be a Flash movie, or are they going to wait to see how Flash goes.  Is the Batman solo film going to happen?  Is there going to be a Man of Steel sequel?  There's now going to be a Black Adam movie - does that go before or after a Shazam movie?  Is there even going to be a Shazam movie?  What about the Deadshot movie?  The Gotham Sirens movie?  Suicide Squad 2?  Where does Justice League 2 fit in?  Green Lantern Corps?  Is Cyborg still getting his own movie?

The problem is that the studio is bothered by everything.  Early returns on Batman made them drastically change that movie.  Early returns on the Suicide Squad trailers caused major re-editing of that movie.  So are future movies going to depend on what movies come out and how they're received?  Is that the correct way to do it?

Again, I'm willing to take "quality" off the table as far as Marvel and DC are concerned.  I don't want to compare how they're doing as much as I like *what* they're doing.  They have a plan, and they have a guy in the middle who acts as an intermediary between the studio and the creative side.  You can say that Feige's doing a shit job, but not that he *has* a shit job. 

The only time we've even heard of instability in Marvel projects was Ant-Man, and Ant-Man was a pretty unique situation because it wasn't designed to fit in the Marvel universe.  Wright ended up leaving the project, and Ant-Man still ended up being a fun little movie.  You don't hear about in-fighting and massive re-shoots and editing coups and stuff like that.  They make a movie, and they release it.  No one ever complains that they didn't get to make the movie they wanted, and there's never any special editions or director's cuts to "fix" the theatrical release.  Maybe they just hire the type of people that won't complain or the type of people that know how to tow the company line.  No idea.  But there's been two movies in the DCEU (it's hard to count Man of Steel since it wasn't designed to be anything but its own thing), and the studio has messed with both of them.

You can talk about both those movies being great on their own, and I'm sure there are millions of people who agree with you.  But it sounds like if they'd just released the extended versions of both movies, they'd have been received better.  So it's not Henry Cavill's fault for being a bad actor or Zach Snyder's bad vision or David Ayer's schizophrenic pacing.  It's a studio that desperately wants a powerhouse cinematic universe, and they panic every time someone says anything borderline negative.

If you think WB is playing all their cards correctly....then I just don't have a good response for that

I'd have to disagree. Peter is supposed to be pretty brilliant. The fight between heroes was in no way justified in the movie, and I think it would have served that character better if they had Tony approach him and Peter just laughed at the absurdity of it all. The airport scene was one of the worst action pieces in the MCU, because it is such large-scale nonsense that it is completely absurd.

Captain America isn't really subtle. He would have been in every history book about WWII. Peter would have grown up thinking of this man as THE ultimate American hero. A legend. I don't think he would have easily turned on that. It'd be like someone agreeing to take down Abraham Lincoln. It'd take a bit of 'splaining to wrap someone's mind around that.

Captain America was a media tool for America in WWII, as far as his first movie goes. Regardless of how many of his actual missions were made public, he was the face of the war effort. It'd be like Peter signing up to go kick Rosie the Riveter's ass. Hell, there are a few high profile people from the 30's or 40's who were huge racists or possibly even Nazi sympathizers, who would still probably make someone hesitate before signing up to try to kill (but not "kill"... but kill) them, based on media spin and name factor alone.

I would say that despite Marvel having just as much internal strife as DC, there is a clear creative voice directing these decisions whereas DC has only recently chosen its film creative director (Geoff Johns of THE FLASH). Before that, DC's power seemed oddly divided; various Warner Bros. suits coming in and going out, directors who controlled one film but with no say in the franchise. Even now, we have seen nothing from the film division with Geoff Johns' voice as all three films released to this date had all creative decisions made pre-Johns.

I find the DC movies to be a muddy mess. I found Marvel's to be the same for their first run of movies. THE INCREDIBLE HULK was edited down to a taut action movie, but it was disappointingly shallow. But IRON MAN was a critical and commercial hit, setting the stage for a superb run straight to AVENGERS. THOR was good. But IRON MAN II, CAP1 and AVENGERS are two of the most confused movies ever made, constantly blowing its own characters' to set up plot points or characters to be on the team in AVENGERS. There was too much emphasis on selling AVENGERS instead of selling Iron Man, Captain America and even Thor.

Marvel gets ridiculous praise for spending all this time and effort setting up AVENGERS when it diluted the individual movies so badly. But after that, the movies swing upward for me; the struggle to introduce the characters was painful and obnoxious, but once the movies could treat them as old friends we already knew, they took more chances on variations of style. Shane Black's absurdist comedy IRON MAN III is a gulf away from the edgy paranoia of WINTER SOLDIER, the mythic wonder of THOR II, the goofy charm of GUARDIANS, etc..

So, for me, Marvel started out the same way DC is starting; a launch fraught with nervous second guessing and selling The Franchise instead of The Film. Maybe they'll do as well as Marvel did for me once all the characters are established.

I'm not one to defend DC's handling of its films, but it may just be a case where Affleck decided that it was too big a job to star and direct in a film like this. He's done a fine job wearing two hats in other situations, but a Batman film, particularly one that's going to be made in this universe... it's going to be all any director can handle. Or maybe he hates the script and doesn't want to have anything more to do with it than he's contractually obligated to do. Hopefully, that's not the case.

I think you're reading way too much into this. Affleck will still be producing, starring and writing the movie. He's not leaving. He is just not directing. Why? Because directing a movie like this will take up a lot of time that Affleck probably doesn't have right now, with his work on making and promoting the Justice League movies, and his work on other projects, which includes producing and acting (possibly some writing, I don't know). He also has young kids and I assume that he wants to see them from time to time.

He's not directing, but he is still very involved in shaping that project. It's not a sign of lack of interest or anything else. Directing is a lot of work that he probably doesn't need to take on if he doesn't have to. This project will only get made if he is happy with the way it's turning out. It wasn't even a part of the original plan.

Maybe, but how many big budget, CG-heavy action movies has Affleck directed? Granted, I haven't seen "I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meathook, and Now I Have a Three Picture Deal at Disney", but of the Affleck movies that I have seen, nothing really comes up to that level. It's a very involved process for someone who is used to going out, shooting the scenes and editing them together. Even if they made a stripped down Batman movie that was less CG and more practical stunts, it would probably be pretty involved.

I hear that Joss Whedon is available!

LOL. Just joking. He's insane now.

I think Informant's right -- Ben Affleck hasn't quit THE BATMAN since he's still writing the script. He just won't be yelling "Action" or "Cut." (Hey, Informant, in this digital age, do they still yell "Cut and Print"?)

Pardon my ignorance here, but how do these contracts work?  If someone is signed to direct something, are they able to leave any time before production actually begins?  What about writing? 

My eventual question is this: we know Affleck is under contract to play Batman in X number of films.  And that, at some point, he was signed on to star/write/direct.

If he quit the project (which, I know, he didn't do), would he get paid for all three?  Two of the three?  None? 

(Acknowledging that I'm coming at this as the Resident DC Pessimist)

Because I'm wondering if he stepped down as director because it's the one thing he could step down from?  He can't/won't quit as a star, and he's already basically written the script.  So DC is going to pay him for the script, and you gotta think he's okay with that.  But if he's soured on the project or the process, is this the easiest way out while still maximizing his earnings?

He is still producing, so I'm sure that he will be quite involved with the big picture elements. Each job may have been a separate contract, I'm not sure. They have different unions though, so probably.

Contracts are usually pretty breakable in Hollywood, unless someone gets really pissed.

“Performing this role demands focus, passion and the very best performance I can give. It has become clear that I cannot do both jobs to the level they require. Together with the studio, I have decided to find a partner in a director who will collaborate with me on this massive film. I am still in this, and we are making it, but we are currently looking for a director. I remain extremely committed to this project, and look forward to bringing this to life for fans around the world.”
-- Ben Affleck

Of all the jobs that he was doing, I think directing was probably the best choice to let go of. He obviously can't not act in the movie. Writing it allows him to get his thoughts across as clearly as possible. Producing gives him a voice in how that vision is presented. Directing is an incredibly important job, but it's demanding as well. He can let go of deciding on camera angles and still have his story told.