More specifically why did Justice League fail? It’s a simple question, put the most iconic characters together on the big screen and it should be an instant hit, right? If Avengers made 1.5 billion dollars Justice League should have doubled that, or at least made the same, right? So why didn’t it? Why did the movie fail?

We have lots of theories out there on the internet. A lot of people come up with their explanation of why it isn’t working. So, let’s look at some of them and see if we can come up with our own, shall we?

DC/WB didn’t have enough time to develop the individual characters, or they rushed themselves to catch up to Marvel. Well the movie that kicked off the MCU was Iron Man released in 2008. The first Avengers movie came out in 2012. So that’s 4 years between films. Man of Steel the film that kicked off the DCEU came out in 2013 Justice League came out in 2017. That’s 4 years between films as well. There were a total of 6 MCU films in Phase one Including Iron Man and Avengers there were a total of 5 Films in the DCEU Including Man of Steel and Justice League. So sounds pretty even there.

The issue might be the films they decided to make. One of the films was Suicide Squad, where though it tied into the DCEU the story was completely separate from the other films which all lead into Justice League. Man of Steel and Batman V Superman both directly tie to the events of Justice League. But nothing from Justice League ties into Suicide Squad, and I’m not saying all the films have to tie in together, but that seemed like an odd movie to diverge from the course on, IMO. We spent 2 hours with a host of characters we have not yet seen in any other DCEU films. Why did we take that trip? I wish we knew.

They introduced too many new characters in Justice League? This one I falf agree with. It wasn’t an instance of too many characters it was an instance of too much backstory for new characters. In the first Avengers movie they introduced Hawkeye and we got very little back story on him. Most of it came from dialog between him and Black Widow. And then in Age of Ultron the Introduced Quick Silver and Scarlet Witch, but their back story was tied into the plot of the film. In Justice league we took time out of the film to show The Flash/Barry Allen’s back story. This was all movie points that should have been in a solo Flash movie, with Barry mentioning his dad is in jail in dialog with another character, and that was all we needed. Adding these scenes into the film did slow down  the movie and did hurt it a bit. It was unnecessary story bits in a movie already crammed with a larger than life story, but was it too much? Still not sure.

The DC characters aren’t cinematic? This is probably the strangest. According to comic book writer Mark Millar the DC comics character’s don’t lend themselves to good films because the characters aren’t compelling enough. I find this interesting since most fans agree the best superhero movie is The Dark Knight in addition the original Superman is considered on of the best superhero movies of all time as well. The characters have also all been around since the 1940’s, with the exception of Cyborg, in one form or another. They wouldn’t have lasted that long if there wasn’t something compelling about them. No these are good characters that have proved themselves on TV and Film time and time again, so what went wrong?

My Thought on this is Marvel did it first and did it really well. The characters Marvel used aren’t better (in fact all their top tier characters were/are owned by different studios). But they took a chance on Iron Man and Hulk. They had no reputation or long list of successful movies at that point so they had nothing to lose. So they made an Iron Man movie that was modern, very well written and extremely produced. It shocked and surprised everyone. They took a chance with a wild card actor and unknown entity as a director and they created a hit. And they just kept following that formula.

So then DC/WB throw their hat in the ring and, in my opinion, they are too afraid to take risks. They hired a director to oversee the DCEU that was known for doing comic book movies, but more indie stuff. And the movies he directed were brutal violent films that, in my opinion, were not the right tone for the DCEU. Then they dug their heels in with Snyder, even when critics and fans bashed Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. I feel they did this because they believed Snyder was a known entity and it was too risky to go with anyone else, meanwhile Patty Jenkins directs the most successful of the DCEU films, the one WB had the least faith in, as a relative unknown and fighting to keep her vision.

So long story short WB/DC needs to keep the suits out of the creative process and hire some directors that are fans of these characters and let them do their thing. Can the DCEU be saved? I don’t know if it’s too late or not, but maybe with Snyder gone they can right the ship I hope. Let me know what you think in the comments down below.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to check out the latest episode of the podcast here: http://superherospeak.com/wp/253-not-so-ready-player-one/