An Autopsy of the DCEU (or, How to Kill a Universe and Get Away with It)


An Autopsy of the DCEU (or, How to Kill a Universe and Get Away with It) 
A History of the DC Film Universe


I go through very distinct phases with comic book movies. I see one in the theatres, spend a while thinking about the genre, then it disappears from my mind. The last time I had seen a comic book movie was July last year when I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home, so I haven’t thought about them in a long time (yes, I did see Joker but that’s not really a proper comic book movie).

I recently got out to see Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (you can read my full review here), the eighth overall film in the current universe. My biggest thought coming out of the film was how radically the DC slate has changed over the years. I went back and googled the original slate of films that they announced back in 2014 and was amazed and how differently the whole situation turned out. The DCEU we were told that we were going to get never happened. Instead, there’s something totally different in its place.

Then I thought, “what a perfect idea for a blog post.”

So here we are now. I have done some work scrubbing through the internet to find out just what happened to the original plan for the DC films. I have written out the story here. This is a version of what happened. The inner workings of studios are notoriously closed off and so much of what we understand to have happened is based on rumors, anonymous sources, ‘he-said-she-said’ information, and reasonable deduction. I have done my best to write something that is at least somewhat factual. 

This is the story of what happened to the DC films - their birth, their death, and their resurrection into what they are now.

The DCEU is dead. Long live the DCEU!


INTRODUCTION: A Brief History of Cinematic Universes



The DC Extended Universe, the DC Expanded Universe, the Worlds of DC -- the current shared continuity of DC films has gone by several different names over the years. In operation since 2013 following the release of Man of Steel that year, the shared universe was Warner Bros.’ attempt at creating their own version of the ultra-successful Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The shared universe model of cinematic storytelling was proved successful thanks to the Marvel brand. The universe was built off of a series of moderately successful, low-stakes superhero solo projects, starting with Iron Man in 2008, and eventually building towards the billion-dollar smash hit The Avengers in 2012. It became the third highest-grossing film of all time and showed that this risky endeavor of weaving multiple films together for a big crossover could actually work.

Every studio wanted in on the hot new trend of the “cinematic universe”. The horror series The Conjuring was turned into a cinematic universe. Then they announced a third cinematic universe with the ‘MonsterVerse’ which would spin out of the Godzilla franchise. Disney announced a series of Star Wars spin-off films to create an SWCU.

Sony announced that it was turning its Spider-Man characters into a cinematic universe. It failed. So they rented the rights to Spider-Man himself out to Disney, then announced a second Spider-Movie-Verse, but his time without Spider-Man.

Fox announced that it was going to revamp the X-Men series into a proper universe and then fold the Fantastic Four into it. Paramount announced a Transformers cinematic universe. Universal announced the ‘Dark Universe’ series - a group of films centred around classic movie monsters like the Mummy, Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man. The LEGO Movie got turned in a universe.

Most of these haven’t gone anywhere. Some seemed doomed to fail - universes build on dying franchises like X-Men and Transformers, or others on characters no one seemed to care about like in the case of the Dark Universe. Some have cracked over time - like the Star Wars spin-offs and the LEGO Movies. Surprisingly, The Conjuring films have been the most stable of all of them.

However, in this wave of rushed film announcements, there was one that stood above the rest. One that most felt could truly be a rival to the MCU. This came in the form of the DCEU.

DC Comics was bringing out their biggest stars - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman - and would unite them all for the first time on the big screen. It seemed too good to be true. Some of the most famous characters in contemporary fiction finally realized in all of their glory. The MCU was done, finished, over with. The victory was inevitable. Disney might as well just cancel all of their planned Marvel movies and to end all of the contracts with their stars.

DC had won and they hadn’t released a single film.


PART 1: The Origin Story


Warner Brothers had two pilots ready to go for their DC project. If one didn’t work, they would use the other as their spring-board. Originally, the intent was to turn the 2011 Green Lantern as the first of a new series of DC films, possibly even incorporating their in-development untitled Superman reboot.

Green Lantern then went to gross $219.9 million against a $200 million budget and earn only 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Plan B was implemented. In June of 2013, Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder, a man who plays an important roll in this narrative, opened in theatres to $668 million worldwide and to a more moderate critical reception. Warner Brothers took this as a massive success and, at Comic-Con San Diego a month later, they announced a sequel. Batman vs. Superman was arriving in July 2015 and the official logo for the project was unveiled.

On a cold, Wednesday morning in October 2014, Warners held its shareholder meeting where they announced that they didn’t just have a Superman versus Batman movie, which got pushed to a March 2016 release date by this point, but an entire slate of ten films in active production that would all release over five years from 2016 to 2020. News broke to the masses later that day.

The original slate was as follows.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - March 25, 2016
Suicide Squad - August 5, 2016
Wonder Woman - June 23, 2017
Justice League Part I - November 17, 2017
The Flash - March 23, 2018
Aquaman - July 27, 2018
Shazam! - April 5, 2019
Justice League Part II - June 14, 2019
Cyborg - April 3, 2020
Green Lantern Corps - June 19, 2020

David Ayer was announced as the director of the Suicide Squad film and Zack Snyder was to direct both of the Justice League movies which would directly continue the narrative started in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Jason Mamoa and Ezra Miller were confirmed as playing Aquaman and The Flash respectively. The studio was also in discussion with “four A-list actors” to lead their Suicide Squad project.

There were rumors that a proper Man of Steel 2 was in the works and that there would also be a Batman solo project, but those had no official basis.

Everything was running along smoothly. Although met with a tough reception from critics, Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad proved to be solid box office contenders. The production of Wonder Woman was running smoothly. Zack Snyder was getting ready to roll with Justice League Part I. A few hiccups, but nothing WB and DC couldn’t work around. Directors and writers were hired. Productions began. Films were shot, edited, and then released. 

What could go wrong?

Yet, here we are in February 2020. We’re only eight movies into the series when we should be at nine. The Flash and the Justice League sequel were never released, Cyborg and Green Lantern are not happening any time soon, and the future films look nothing like the ones we were expecting.

This is the slate of films now - the ones already released and the ones upcoming.

Released:
Man of Steel - June 14, 2013
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - March 25, 2016
Suicide Squad - August 5, 2016
Wonder Woman - June 23, 2017
Justice League - November 17, 2017
Aquaman - July 27, 2018
Shazam! - April 5, 2019
Birds of Prey - February 7, 2020

Coming Soon:
Wonder Woman 1984 - June 5. 2020
The Batman - June 25, 2021
The Suicide Squad - August 6, 2021
Black Adam - December 22, 2021
Shazam! 2 - April 1, 2022
The Flash - July 1, 2022
Aquaman 2 - December 16, 2022

These changes have changed the makeup of the cast of characters as well. Henry Cavil and Ben Affleck have unofficially officially left their roles as Superman and Batman respectively (Robert Pattinson is taking over from Affleck in The Batman). The Suicide Squad will be more a reboot than a sequel with James Gunn writing and directing the project. Ezra Miller is still on tap to play The Flash, although that film is stuck in limbo and, after a long revolving door of writers and directors, has no firm creative team behind it.

The brand has lost its strong ‘shared universe’ feel with each new spin-off taking on a new tone and energy. Look no further than the last four films released under the DC banner. Aquaman was an insane, high-budget fantasy-action film. Shazam! was a kids’ movie. Joker, not officially a part of the DCEU, was a Scorsese-inspired character study. Birds of Prey was a small-budget, gritty R-rated action flick.

Additionally, Warners and DC have announced another 21 (!!!) films that are all somewhere in development. They are the Wonder Woman spin-off Amazonians; the Batman spin-off Batgirl solo film: a Blue Beetle film; a Booster Gold film; that Cyborg film eventually; the Suicide Squad Deadshot spin-off with Will Smith; the Joe Manganiello lead Deathstroke film; a Gotham City Sirens movie featuring Harley Quinn, a character who is going to be in a lot of these upcoming projects; the Green Lantern Corps is still going ahead with Geoff Johns writing; a Harley Quinn and Joker film possible called Harley Quinn vs. the Joker set after The Suicide Squad; a stand-alone Jared Leto Joker film, that has nothing to do with the Joaquin Phoenix one; a Justice League sequel, maybe; a Justice League Dark film that was going to be directed by Guillermo Del Toro; a Lobo solo project; a Man of Steel sequel, although this no longer seems likely; the Ava DuVernay directed New Gods film; a Nightwing solo film from Chris McKay, the guy who directed The LEGO Batman Movie; a Plastic Man film; a Supergirl spin-off from Man of Steel; the horror-inspired Aquaman spin-off The Trench; and finally, Wonder Woman Three.

For better or for worse, the brand has totally lost its original plan and main ideas.

How did we get here?


PART 2: A League Disassembled



It’s not an absurd statement to say that what was once was the DCEU has fallen apart. Since the release of 2017’s Justice League, no film has ever fully fallen under the original plan. Not really. They all technically reside within the same continuity, but the tissue between them is increasingly strained.

Why? Why did Warners Brothers abandon the shared universe structure that had shown Marvel so much success?

Turns out, you can’t greenlight ten movies over five years after you turn out a single moderate success. Ideas like the DCEU take time to build and establish. They didn’t put in the effort, and so they don’t get the results they wanted. That’s the easy answer at least.

The thing is, the DC situation isn’t that simple. They had a strong creative head setting the tone and standard for the films in the form of director Zack Snyder. He had a plan, and if they had followed it, things would have gone differently. They would have had the cohesive universe they desired with everything stemming from his vision and ideas. And Snyder certainly had a lot of ideas. But with the poor critical reception and the mixed audience reception of Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it seemed as if those ideas Snyder had weren’t all that well-liked.

It’s November 2017. Justice League opens to negative critical reception and poor box office numbers. The film cost the studio somewhere between $300 - 350 million dollars to make (excluding promotional costs) which is a budget insanely high even by film standards. The film underperforms at only around $658 million, which would cover its costs, but falls significantly short of the $1 billion standard set by their contemporaries at Marvel and Star Wars.

Director Zack Snyder with Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot.
Behind the scenes of Justice League.
A lot of Justice League’s failure can be put onto the intense studio meddling that plagued its later production. Zack Snyder had to step down as director of the project in May 2017 after his daughter tragically passed away. He passed the torch to Joss Weadon who took over post-production and the last few reshoots that hadn’t been done. Most of the additional photography had already been planned and prepped by Snyder. Weadon just had to follow the guidelines. Weadon leads two months of photography, costing an additional $25 million, and finished off the film. Meanwhile, there was the famous mustache debacle in which VFX artists had to digitally remove Henry Cavil’s mustache in post-production as he could not shave it thanks to his obligation to Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), which was also being shot at the time.

As this is happening, the narrative that Warners was deeply unhappy with what was going on with the film begins to circulate. A story comes out staying executives from the studio had described an early workprint cut of the film screened back in April as “unwatchable”. Meanwhile, CEO Kevin Tsujihara mandated that the film run under two hours, which would radically change the film Snyder had intended. The story now becomes that the death of Snyder’s daughter allowed for the studio to take full control of the film and alter it as they saw fit. A lot of this is supported by the fact that reshoots of the film, which aren’t uncommon amongst big, tentpole, effects-heavy pictures, expanded from two weeks to two months.

Rumors suggest that the troubles started far earlier back in 2016. Thanks to the negative reception of the predecessor and the implementation of famous comic book writer Geoff Johns and film producer Jon Berg as the new creative heads of the DCEU, the film underwent some extensive rewrites. Joss Weadon was originally brought on board simply to write new scenes for the film with fellow screenwriter Chris Terrio (the genius behind The Rise of Skywalker).

The end result is a film that feels like two different versions of the same project smashed into one. Not a clean merger of the two directors, but two version cuts hastily together.

Then, of course, comes the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut trend. Petitions were signed and GoFundMes were created to have Warner Brothers release the “correct”, fully Snyder’d version of the film. It’s a trend that in over two years hasn’t gone away. Many of the film’s stars have thrown their support behind it, with Zack Snyder himself getting ever more involved.

Director David Ayer and Margot Robbie behind the
scenes of Suicide Squad.
But DC is no stranger to broken productions. Their 2016 film Suicide Squad had another famously hellish production.

With a release date firmly in place before production had started, writer/director David Ayer had but six weeks to write the screenplay for Suicide Squad, which is far too little time to complete a proper screenplay. In contrast, Joker took a whole year to write. A lot of older films used to take about six months to a whole year to write, but now most studios ask for a first draft in about ten to twelve weeks. Ayer had to write the final draft in only six.

He shoots hundreds of hours of footage while working on the film hoping to find it somewhere in the process. He later said that there was probably enough footage of Harley Quinn and Joker to make their own separate film. Ayer shot an incomplete script and far too much footage. Hopefully, he can piece something together and make it presentable.

Then steps in our friends the executives at Warners during the late editing stages of the film. They hired a company called Trailer Park, the guys who edited their original Comic-Con sneak preview of the film to do an alternate cut of the film. However, they are told to make their cut in the style of the first theatrical trailer, which was cut be another trailer studio, Aspect.

Both of the cuts of the film are screened for test audiences to mixed results. WB ends up going with a bastardized version of both films, which ends up being a total disaster to watch and leaves a bad taste in the months of the creatives involved.

What do we end up with? Two cases of studio interference that broke two different movies and two different directors.  The films weren’t performing all that well with either audiences or critics (Wonder Woman remaining the one exception). They had failed to properly stoke interest with the average filmgoers and the critical scene wasn’t impressed from a filmmaking standpoint. Meanwhile, the obsessive oversight from the studio kept losing directors of The Flash which was slated still for a 2018 release. The DCEU had fallen apart.

Warner Bros. had a corpse in their basement. There was a bullet hole in its head. Blood was pooling on the floor. The executives held the gun in their collective hand. The Flash never happened. Justice League II was never pursued. Cyborg was dead in the water. Green Lantern Corps. was put on indefinite hold*. All was lost.


*indefinite hold translates from film speak into English as “we locked this thing in our deepest, darkest basement hoping that either you all would forget about it, it would die on its own like The Cask of Amontillado, or, if we’re really lucky, both.”



PART 3: Brave New Universe











ocean man





. . . take me by the hand.



Lead me to the land!


THAT YOU UNDERSTAND!


Aquaman arrived in theatres in December 2018, making over $1 billion and saving the franchise. WB had obviously reevaluated their priorities. Under the leadership of Geoff John, the series turned from the ultra-planned out world of the Snyder era and into a weird mashup of different styles and creative visions all under the same banner. Aquaman proved to be a ridiculous, over the top, hyper campy mess of a film and it was beautiful. Riding the line between genius and garbage, Aquaman put some much energy back into the franchise and proved that under the influence of strong creative voices, anything could work.

Jason Mamoa as Aquaman.
Their next film was Shazam!, which turned out to just be a kids’ movie, but it was so much fun, incredibly delightful, and radically different from their previous output.

Margot Robbie was concurrently fighting to get her Harley Quinn-led team-up film Birds of Prey off the ground, and the success of Aquaman allowed for that to happen. She had spent years struggling to get it green-lit, and with the new DCEU, she could. Robbie curated a film with a distinctive creative voice by finding the right writers, and directors, and performers to make it all work.

And the future is continuing these trends. The next film in the universe is Wonder Woman 1984 with director Patty Jenkins returning. The original proved to be the DCEU’s one true success. It made $822 million off of a $150 million budget and holds a strong critical favouring. This time, Jenkins is co-writing the screenplay with Geoff Johns and has been given far more creative freedom over the project.

Looking ahead to 2021, we’re getting two films where DC thinks that they can simply slap the word ‘the’ in front of the title are pretend it’s something new and they are both shaping up to be very creator-run projects. Matt Reeves, the director behind the dawn of and the war for the Planet of the Apes, is in charge of The Batman where he is serving triple duty as director-writer-producer, although with some help on those second two roles. James Gunn, the creator of the popular Guardians of the Galaxy films, is serving as the lone writer and director of The Suicide Squad.

The universe has taken a totally new approach to the shared universe model. The old plan wasn’t going to work, so they threw it out the window. Instead of manufacturing a close, careful, and narrow universe built around a single storyline, they blew the doors wide open to a whole host of unique creative visions and ideas and let them all exist under the same roof. They are embracing the full versatility of the superhero and of the idea of a shared universe. It’s something that none of the other big franchises are doing. The future is really unpredictable. There’s no narrative, no grand arc, it’s just creators and their films. I respect DC and Warner Bros for letting this happen. There’s a unique creative energy coming from this brand that I’m not seeing in other competitors.

The new DCEU doesn’t fit well together at all. Just try to imagine for a second a crossover between Shazam! and the Birds of Prey. Never going to happen. But that’s ok. Maybe that’s even kind of the point. And that’s really exciting.

The DCEU is dead. Long live the DCEU!



Works Cited

Bacon, Thomas. “How & Why The DCEU's Original Slate Changed So Much”. ScreenRant. ScreenRant. 2019. https://screenrant.com/dceu-movies-slate-original-changed-why/.

Fischer, Russ. “DC Comics Movies Announced: ‘Suicide Squad,’ ‘Wonder Woman,’ ‘Justice League,’ ‘The Flash,’ ‘Aquaman’”. /Film. /Film. 2014. https://www.slashfilm.com/dc-movie-slate-revealed/.

“Green Lantern (film)”. Wikipedia. Wikipedia. 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lantern_(film).

Kit, Borys. “Zack Snyder Steps Down From 'Justice League' to Deal With Family Tragedy”. The Hollywood Reporter. Prometheus Global Media. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/zack-snyder-steps-down-justice-league-deal-family-tragedy-1006455.

Olson, Dan. “The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad”. FoldingIdeas. YouTube. 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDclQowcE9I&t=1535s.

Olson, Dan. “The Snyder Cut Does (Not) Exist”. FoldingIdeas. YouTube. 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pGlYF3xLrM&t=885s.

Sunu, Steve. “WB Announces DC Film Slate Through 2020; Momoa is Aquaman, Miller is Flash”. Cbr.com. CBR. https://www.cbr.com/wb-announces-dc-film-slate-through-2020-momoa-is-aquaman-miller-is-flash/.

Comments