Category: Dan at the Movies

Assessing the exploitation of DC Comics

I’m a fan of DC Comics until the end of days. No getting around that. My first formative comics-reading experience, or at least the earliest one I remember, was Crisis on Infinite Earths, featuring every character in DC’s stable. I didn’t follow the Avengers or the X-Men, I read Justice League. I liked Batman, Superman, and even Blue Beetle and Booster Gold far more than Spider-man or Captain America.

Today I’m less exclusive. I read my fair share of Marvel books, just way, way less than DC. I’d still rather read an okay comic about Superman than a great comic about Wolverine.

Which is why it breaks my heart that when it comes to movies and other adaptations, Warner Bros. is getting their ass kicked so hard by Marvel Studios.

Let me explain. It’s not the success of Marvel Studios that bothers me. Well, not most days. There is a certain internet geek pundit who I shan’t name or link to who is so obsessed with slagging everything DC does, inventing flaws if necessary, while championing every single thing that Marvel Studios does, ignoring flaws as often as he has to, that I felt this weird need to resent Marvel properties to balance him out. But that is not healthy, and it’s why I’m giving up his videos and articles. Because I can’t stop him from being rigidly and unflinchingly biased (if you honestly think Agents of SHIELD is a better show than Arrow, you’re just wrong), but I can stop myself from sinking into the same swamp.

So, no, it’s not that I resent Marvel movies doing well. Super excited to see both Captain America: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy. What kills me is that Warner Bros. is not keeping up. And when they do try and exploit DC’s properties, you just have to ask… are you even trying?

At the movies

I liked Man of Steel and I’m not sorry. As such, I refuse to be pessimistic about the upcoming sequel featuring Ben Affleck as Batman, especially since it means the next Batman movie won’t be an origin story. And if they do, in fact, try to follow that up with a Flash movie leading into Justice League, I am all for it. Hell, there’s still time to get Darkseid into a movie before Thanos finally makes a proper appearance in Avengers 3.

That sounded like slagging Marvel but it’s just that Thanos is a knockoff of Darkseid (no, really, look it up), and I’d rather people not claim it’s the opposite just because Thanos made it into a movie first. That’s all.

For decades now, Warner Bros. has been coasting on Batman. Since 1989, there have been eight theatrically-released movies about Batman, ranging from incredible (The Dark Knight) to great (Batman Begins, Mask of the Phantasm) to pretty okay (Batman, The Dark Knight Rises) to crimes against cinema (Batman and Robin). In the same 24 year time frame, there have only been two good-but-not-great Superman movies, one movie for Green Lantern that could charitably be called a misfire, and Shaquille O’Neal as Steel. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on that one.

No I do not count Catwoman. That movie has as much to do with the comic character Catwoman as the Karate Kid movies had to do with the Legion of Superheroes. Same name, no other connection or similarity.

Now consider what Marvel managed to do in half that time. Since just 2008, Marvel Studios alone has cranked out three Iron Man movies, two for Thor, one for Captain America (with another in the wings), one for the Hulk, and their crown jewel, the Avengers. And these range in quality from amaze-balls (Avengers) to merely mediocre (Iron Man 2, Thor), with most achieving a rank of “actually pretty damn good.” Throw in the characters they sold to other studios before forming their own, and in only 13 years we’ve had four movies for Spider-man and the X-Men, two for Ghost Rider, the Fantastic Four, Wolverine, and the Punisher, one for Daredevil, a spin-off for Elektra and another for Hulk. Now, these range in quality a bit more drastically, from great (Spiderman 2, X-2) to pretty bad (most of them) to downright excruciating (Ang Lee’s Hulk), so quantity doesn’t assure quality.

But in terms of numbers, Warner Bros. can’t really compete: Marvel Studios exists to crank out Marvel properties, whereas DC Entertainment is but a part of the larger Warner Bros. empire, which has other things going on and can’t commit to the same mass-production. But here’s my real problem.

By 2014, there will have been eight movies for Batman, six for Superman, three for Blade, and two movies starring freaking Ghost Rider, but zero movies starring Wonder Woman. The greatest female super-hero of all time, the third member of DC’s Big Three, and Rocket Raccoon is going to be in a movie before she is. Nobody at Warner Bros. should be proud of this, and whoever fired Joss Whedon when he was trying to write a movie for her should be banned from movie-making forever.

Maybe Warner Bros. can’t commit to more than one movie per year. But come on. Diana of Themyscria should be at the top of the list.

Now… the small screen.

On the teevee

I’m going to focus on DC’s shows here, because that’s my main point. Suffice to say I’m intrigued to see the four shows Marvel sold to Netflix and I sure hope Agents of SHIELD gets better.

Now, here is an area where DC is at least competitive. Sure, Birds of Prey tanked pretty hard, but Smallville lasted ten seasons and as many as six of them were pretty watchable*.

And now we have Arrow, which started out surprisingly good and is growing into the first truly great superhero show in a generation. In their second season, Arrow has made Oliver Queen an amazing and conflicted protagonist, given him a great supporting cast (even Thea Queen, season one’s weak link, has improved dramatically), and is doing unparalleled work at building the comic-based universe around its central characters.

Unparalleled. Looking at you, Agents of SHIELD. (Sorry, sorry, back to my point)

So between the cult hit of Arrow and the hype and moderate success surrounding Agents of SHIELD, it’s only natural that more shows based around superheroes start turning up. Given that comic books are a medium based around serial storytelling, TV has always been a better fit; 22 episodes a year allows for much better long-term storytelling than one movie every two to four years. So let’s see what DC has in the pipeline, shall we?

The Flash

Thus far, the Arrow-verse has held the line on super powers. Nobody has them. That’s set to change when Barry Allen makes his debut for the mid-season finale, leading to a planned Flash spin-off series next year. And I’m excited. Because while the showrunners did fail at producing a good Green Lantern movie, Arrow’s been knocking it out of the park this year, so I trust them to replicate that success with the Flash. Hey, I was a huge fan of the first Flash TV series, which actually holds up better than I thought it would.

My only qualm is that they’re making this Flash series at the same time that they’re prepping a Flash movie, and if they’re not connected? If Warner Bros. officially splits their movie universe apart from the TV universe while Marvel is maintaining one continuity across all of their endeavors? That’s worse than a missed opportunity. That’s grade-A dumb.

So here’s hoping that they do the smart thing and use Flash to link up Man of Steel and the Arrow-verse. I just wish that hope weren’t so fleeting.

Gotham

And now we hit grade-A stupid full-on.

Gotham is a rumoured pilot for the Fox network about Jim Gordon’s early police career in a pre-Batman Gotham City.

Does everyone see why this is a terrible idea? Do I need to go on? Well, the fact that this might be a real thing means someone doesn’t see the massive flaws, so I’ll elaborate.

First off. Splitting your properties across multiple networks is just throwing up barriers to building a shared universe, something that, once again, Marvel has proven works like gangbusters. It will be easy to do Arrow/Flash crossovers, since they’ll both be on the CW, but Fox isn’t known for playing well with others.

Second. It took Smallville several years to start having other proto-versions of DC’s heroes turn up, but it was always a big success. They got a massive ratings spike from having Aquaman show up, of all people. Adding Green Arrow to the cast salvaged the back half of the series. They added Flash (well, sort of), Cyborg, Hawkman, Stargirl, Doctor Fate, the Legion of Superheroes, even Booster Gold and Blue Beetle.

Notice a name missing from that list? Because the fans sure did.

Smallville was basically forbidden to use Bruce Wayne/Batman at any point. Rumour has it they brought in Green Arrow, ultimately making him a regular, because there was a role they wanted young Bruce Wayne to play in shaping Clark’s path but weren’t allowed to use him. Warner Bros. made the baffling decision to isolate Batman from everything else they were doing. Okay, sure, the larger DC universe wouldn’t have fit in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but I don’t see why that means Bruce Wayne couldn’t be on Smallville. And now Arrow is name-dropping Ra’s Al Ghul and rumours are flying that Nightwing will turn up, but again no mention of Batman.

And that is bad enough. Banning Batman from Smallville and Arrow is already a dumb move, but banning him from a series starring one of his supporting cast? A series set in Gotham but with no Batman? Who thinks there’s an audience for that? You want to replicate Agents of SHIELD? Fine. I get that. But there’s already a perfect template for that, and it was called Gotham Central. Gotham Central had a rich and fascinating cast of police detectives trying to solve crimes in a city where the drug dealer you’re planning to bust might turn out to be Mr. Freeze. Most importantly, a series where Batman was never a regular player, but did turn up from time to time. That is the Gotham-based cop show I would watch. The adventures of Jim Gordon before Batman began? No. No thank you. I watched Clark Kent refuse to become Superman for ten goddamn years, I’m not doing it again.

Constantine

Meanwhile, NBC is looking to develop a show based around John Constantine, the magician/con man who has grown from a linchpin of DC’s mature-readers Vertigo line to a key figure in the magical portion of DC’s main product line. As a solo operator or the defacto leader of the Justice League Dark, he takes on demons, monsters, and other magicians to maintain the balance and protect the world, but is generally a bastard about it and tends to get the people closest to him killed. He was already turned into a not-terrible movie starring Keanu Reeves, but is ripe for re-adaption. And possibly this time they’ll let him stay British.

I have two problems with this. First, again, being on a different network means that any Constantine show will again risk being a stand-alone, when all I want is for DC to embrace the shared universe as rabidly as Marvel has. Second, why haven’t they cast Mark Sheppard as Constantine yet? Sure, he’s not young anymore, but he’s a British actor who specializes in playing bastards you can’t help but love in geek-friendly shows. He’s a perfect fit, dagnabbit.

Hourman

Hourman was one of DC’s earliest characters, a chemist named Rex Tyler who developed a pill called Miraclo that gave him super-strength, speed and invulnerability for one hour. Sort of like a super-soldier serum you have to keep taking. There have been other attempts to make characters named Hourman, but the one that stood the test of time is, basically, the first superhero drug addict.

Seriously, the most interesting thing they’ve done with Hourman in the last twenty years is have Dr. Mid-nite, his JSA teammate who is also a physician, constantly berate him about how he’s clearly addicted to Miraclo and how unhealthy that is.

Not that any of this would be in the proposed TV series. No, they’re borrowing a much lesser-known power from a much lesser-known version of the character, the ability to see one hour into the future. Skipping over the costumed adventurer whose powers come from a troubling source, skipping over the time-travelling android from the far future trying to learn to be human, and focusing on the most obscure Hourman-related ability they could find.

Mm-hm.

Is it even a superhero show at this point? Because it feels like an utterly generic “protagonist must stop a tragedy before it happens” show. Early Edition with a tighter deadline. I’m not convinced they’d even give him a costume.

Wrapping up

So. While Marvel is building their universe through more Avengers movies and their ultra-ambitious Defenders project on Netflix, DC looks to be splitting up their universe more and more with redundant Flashes, unnecessary prequels, and farming their characters out to different studios, the exact strategy that is limiting Marvel to their B and C-list characters, because they sold their A-list to Sony and Fox.

And through all of this, nothing for Wonder Woman. If you’re desperate enough to turn to Hourman of all people, you should be desperate enough to finally make a Wonder Woman project that’s any good.

I want to see a DC cinematic universe. I do not want to continue to see DC characters existing in independent bubbles, with no crossing over allowed. Unless, of course, this is all building to the Netflix miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which Smallville, the Nolan-verse, Arrow-verse, and various other movie and TV universes collide… man, I’d watch the shit out of that. Shame that isn’t happening. Great. Somehow I’ve managed to depress myself even more.

But this is why you hurt me, Warner Bros. It’s not because Marvel is beating you. It’s because it doesn’t even seem like you’re stepping up to the plate. Please, do better.

*Not a recommendation. I stand by my policy of never officially recommending Smallville. Watch it if you want, but that’s your decision. I cannot guarantee your safety, nor will I be responsible for your fate.

How to ruin your sequel

And I’m back. The run of a play I was in and adjustment to a new work schedule have made posting difficult as of late. Real talk, society: 5:30 AM is no time to be awake. It’s unnatural. You know how I know? The sun isn’t up yet. If the sun isn’t up, it is not “early in the morning,” it is still night.

Anyway.

Last night, as a final Halloween celebration, I was at a horror movie marathon, the theme of which was “A Night at the Cabin,” horror films featuring cabins in the woods, ending of course with Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s excellent Cabin in the Woods. Cabin is a hilarious and thrilling deconstruction of horror films, whose ending always makes me a little conflicted, as it basically guarantees there will be no sequel ever (the box office helped assure that as well, but that’s neither here nor there). On the one hand, the premise of all the horror movie tropes being engineered by a mysterious organization in a bunker (personified hilariously by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) is so much fun that it’s a shame there can’t be more of it. On the other hand, I can’t imagine a sequel to this movie actually working on any level. It would surely end up a retread of all the popular jokes and scenes from its predecessors.

You know, like Austin Powers.

Sequels exist because giving audiences more of something they enjoyed is a relatively safe bet for movie executives. The problem is that “People liked that, let’s make another” isn’t the best way to begin a creative endeavor. There are good sequels, to be sure: Terminator 2, The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sequels that build on what came before and manage to find new and great stories to tell with characters we’ve already come to love. Others… others screw up. Here’s some ways they do that.

“Let’s just do that again”

What might be the most common and laziest way to make a sequel: say “Hey, that worked, let’s just do it again.” And why not? Doesn’t that work for James Bond? That’s a franchise built around “And then James Bond foils another villain,” and Skyfall proved that after fifty years there’s still a surprising amount of gas in that tank, if you’re willing to try.

Sadly, not everyone is willing to make that kind of effort.

Witness Austin Powers. The first one was a delightful surprise, a breath of fresh air. The second one recycled all the popular jokes from the first movie and added some newer, less funny jokes. Goldmember did the same. And that’s why instead of being a trilogy of classic comedies with a best-selling special edition box set, they are instead our greatest case study of diminishing returns. See also the Hangover trilogy, which went from “surprise hit” to “surprise bomb” in just two movies.

The Ring 2 is another key example. The Ring was, in my opinion, an amazing horror film, replacing jump-scares with a remarkably consistent aura of dread and ending in a climax scary enough I hid in my coat rather than re-watch it on my second viewing. The Ring 2 was made by people trying to re-create the key beats of the movie based on a rough description, and was terrible.

Witness Batman and Robin, which began its many, many, many crimes against film making by kicking off the plot with Commissioner Gordon saying “There’s a new villain in town, please come stop him” and pretty much nothing else. More egregious? The Men in Black movies. Men in Black could have been a hell of a franchise, but instead of using the first movie to establish the world and then build on it in sequels and whatnot, they instead tried whatever they could to just re-do the basic story beats of the original. And they also bring us to my second sequel mis-step.

Frank the Pug Syndrome

If I accomplish one thing though blogging, let it be making “Frank the Pug Syndrome” a recognized trope. That or Infinite Respawn. You know, when the heroes have to fight a faceless horde of something, like zombies or henchmen or Chitauri, and they’re weak enough for the heroes to be able to stop while looking badass but since they never stop coming the heroes are gradually overwhelmed? Not my point. Right. Where was I.

Frank the Pug was a once-scene joke in the first Men in Black movie, and far from the best joke at that, but the makers of MIB2 thought that an alien disguised as a pug dog was intrinsically hilarious enough to make him a full-fledged member of the team in the sequel. He was not. All he did was serve as a piss-poor replacement for Linda Fiorentino (either not asked to return or not interested in doing so) and Patrick Warburton. Seriously, putting Patrick Warburton in your movie as Will Smith’s new partner and then ditching him after ten minutes in favour of a “wacky” talking dog? Bad writers. Zero points for you.

And so I came to coin “Frank the Pug Syndrome” as a term for any sequel who takes a minor character from the previous movie and inadvisably gives them a much bigger role in the sequel. Shrek 2 is another example, with bigger parts for previously one-joke characters like the Gingerbread Man, Pinocchio, and the Big Bad Wolf. I haven’t seen Shrek 2, maybe it worked okay, but I very much doubt anything the Gingerbread Man did was as funny as the Muffin Man bit from the first movie.

Or look at X-Men 3. That movie became immensely over-crowded, because they kept wanting to bring in new characters, but also wanted to give expanded roles to everyone from the first two (except Cyclops, who was killed off to punish James Marsden for following Bryan Singer to Superman Returns). It’s not that Iceman, Kitty Pryde and Colossus didn’t deserve bigger parts, it’s that there just wasn’t room to do that while introducing Beast, Angel, Juggernaut, and Jamie Madrox while giving Storm a more dominant role to appease Halle Berry and continuing to fetishize Wolverine because that’s what the X-Men empire appears to be built on.

Even just trying to bring back every single person of note from the previous movie can be a struggle. Looking at you, American Pie 2 and Ocean’s 12. But then, it is possible, very possible, to go too far in the other direction.

Throwing out too much

Sometimes people come along to make a sequel who seem to have no idea how or why the previous film worked. Now, sometimes a director will want to put his own stamp on a franchise, and good for him: Aliens was a worthy successor to Alien because James Cameron wasn’t trying to just re-do what Ridley Scott did in the first movie, he simply took the world it created and ran in his own direction. The Mission: Impossible movies, however, vary so wildly in tone and style that it’s hard to believe they actually take place in the same world.

A more obscure example: a 1990s Chinese kung-fu movie called the Heroic Trio, in which a vigilante named Wonder Woman (but not that Wonder Woman), a mercenary called Thief-Catcher and a thief called the Invisible Woman (not that Invisible Woman, but played by Michelle Yeoh!) eventually team up to fight evil. Eventually. Invisible Woman is on the wrong side for most of the movie and they don’t become a Heroic Trio until the climax of the movie. I had fun with it, so my friend the Video Vulture suggested watching the sequel. Which takes place decades later, in a post-apocalyptic society, years after the Heroic Trio have split up.

This was the second movie.

At one point one of the Trio says something along the lines of “Remember all those adventures we had as the Heroic Trio?” and I, as viewer, could only proclaim “WELL I SURE FUCKING DON’T!” Not only am I still baffled why they felt post-apocalyptic was a natural next step (there was no hint of the impending collapse of society in the first movie), they spent the entire first movie creating the Heroic Trio and then skipped over their entire existence as a unit. It would be like if Christopher Nolan had gone straight from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight Rises–no, to the second half of The Dark Knight Rises, when Bane already controls the city. The origin comes at the beginning, “years after retirement” comes at the end, but something is supposed to go in the middle.

That was a lot of time spent on an obscure Chinese film. Seem to be running out of room to also diss the Terminator franchise. Okay. Speed mode. The central premises of the first two Terminators were a) unstoppable robot assassins from the future trying to kill people in the present, aided by the heroes’ lack of access to futuristic weapons; and b) the idea that the War of the Machines can be won or even prevented through time travel. Sarah Connor clings to the belief that “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves,” while the entire time travel gambit was a hail-Mary desperation ploy by Skynet to avert its impending defeat at the hands of John Connor. Terminator 2 hammered this notion, and was the best of the franchise. Terminator 3 immediately threw it all out and declared the Judgement Day could not be prevented, only delayed.

Think about that for a moment. They’re not saying that man creating an AI is inevitable, or even that man and sentient machine going to war is inevitable; they’re saying that man creating a military AI named Skynet who nukes the planet and invents Terminators and time travel is inevitable. Is that not a weirdly specific turn of events to be unavoidable? And if Judgement Day can’t be prevented, than why can a successful human resistance be stopped by killing John Connor as a child? Either future events are set in stone or they’re not. If stopping Skynet’s inventor only means that someone else invents the exact same Skynet, then wouldn’t some other visionary warrior rise up in place of John Connor? If the future can’t be stopped, isn’t this entire time travel cold war between man and machine a gigantic waste of time? Like Terminator 3 turned out to be?

Sadly I’m out of time to talk about Terminator: Salvation, except to say that it threw out the franchise’s other premise by setting the movie post-Judgement Day and having regular, modern-day weapons work just fine against the previously bullet-proof Terminators. Bad writers, no cookie.

Sequels ruined horror movies

As a final note on sequels, here’s how I think they’ve mutated the slasher movie horror sub-genre into something I have a harder time enjoying than I used to. See, in order to have a franchise, you normally need a strong recurring character or characters to hang it off. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Michael Corleone, Ripley, etc. Someone we’re happy to root for time and time again. But for slasher flicks, your central, recurring character is your monster: Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Chucky, etc. They’re the ones who keep coming back to kill a fresh crop of victims, one of whom is a determined yet tormented heroine (or Tommy Jarvis) who despite losing friends, family, and/or potential lovers, is finally able to dispatch the fiend. Who inevitably comes back because they want to make another one.

The problem is that since the killers are typically the only or at least primary recurring characters, they eventually become the most interesting ones in order to keep the audience’s attention through fresh, new ways to kill teenagers for having premarital sex. The kills are, after all, the only variety the franchise is getting other than finding different locales for the carnage, be it Manhattan or, when they’re really desperate, space. This means that the struggle to stop the monster becomes depressingly futile. Jason had the decency to stalk a fresh new batch of teenagers each time (except for the above mentioned Tommy Jarvis, who killed Jason twice but went a little crazy in between), but Freddy Krueger usually kicked off his latest movie by finishing off the survivors from the last one. So their big triumph over Freddy lasted about a year, tops.

And that has become ingrained into contemporary slasher movies to the point where the villain’s inevitable return isn’t just hinted at any more. Now Freddy, Jason, and Victor Crowley‘s defeat at the hands of the Final Girl doesn’t even last until the end of the movie, as they’re back from the dead and killing again right as the credits start to roll. I’d call that an unsatisfying ending, but it isn’t even an ending! A four-minute lull in Jason trying to kill Jared Padalecki doesn’t mean the story is over if he’s just going to leap up and start again afterwards. Also, that’s Sam goddamn Winchester, Vorhees. Just stay down.

But to a certain audience, maybe that works. The audience that is down with rooting for the killer, not the victims. But that mentality leads to House of 1,000 Corpses, which from what I could tell was about glorifying the killers to the point that the victims make no effort to fight back, as they only exist to be creatively dispatched, and I honestly cannot think of a movie I’ve loathed more than that. I haven’t seen all of it, and I don’t intend to.

There are probably other ways to botch a sequel. Maybe you can name some. In fact, I encourage you to do so in the comments. But I’ve taken up enough of your time for now. Thanks for your time, I’ll try not to let day jobs keep me from posting for so long again.