The Geek Beat: DC Delays

by Elisabeth Rappe Apr 7th 2009 // 2:03PM

Filed under: Fandom, The Geek Beat



As a Marvel fan, I do tend to overlook the DC characters in my weekly columns. This isn't intended as a snub, but the simple fact is that I just don't know the finer points of the DC stable. I can give my two cents as to who I think should play Hal Jordan, but I can't really do any more than that just because I'm unfamiliar with all but the basic mythology. (This will inevitably take a chunk of my cred – although if you think that's bad, you should have been at the D&D table when I feebly suggested Adam Baldwin as a potential Green Lantern.) This puts me into a weird position when it comes to Warner Bros and their movie franchises. I can identify with general audiences a little more, as I'm a slightly harder sell. But I also know enough of the characters that I understand just what a tough task the studio has ahead of them in trying to adapt them for the big screen.

That said – what exactly is going on over there?

As of January, Warner Bros was putting all DC properties on hold. The last update we had was via David S. Goyer and IESB.net: "They're going to come up with some new plan, methodology, things like that so everything has just been pressed pause on at the moment. It was the double header of both Iron Man and The Dark Knight coming out, so more than ever I think they've realized, I think DC was responsible for 15% of Warner Brother's revenue this year, something crazy like that, so they realized that comic books, it's become a new genre, one of the most successful genres."



It's an understandable action. It's one that other studios (coughFoxcough) might be wise to follow before rushing headlong into bad casting and story ideas. The superhero frenzy has been going for some time (arguably since X-Men), and no other studio has frozen in their tracks quite like poor Warner Bros has. In the year I've been on Cinematical (arguably the Year of Geek), they're exactly where they started off – no Green Lantern, no Superman, no Wonder Woman. Sure, you got Batman, but at this point it almost seems like a fluke. It took major studio guts to hire Christopher Nolan and to let him have free rein with the character and his mythology – but in the end, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight was all Nolan. If it was up purely to Warner Bros to decide what to do, we might still be waiting for his return as we are with Superman.

Yet from the outside, no one could have it easier than Warner Bros. They have rights to three of the most successful and iconic characters of pop culture (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and they get to do the most fun and easy chapter -- the origin stories. No matter how godlike and awesome DC characters are, creating an origin story for Wonder Woman seems a lot easier than deciding what she should do in subsequent installments. You even have a mold-breaking model with Iron Man and Batman Begins, where two directors successfully cherry-picked the comics to create their own first chapters. It looks like pretty smooth sailing, but they seem utterly perplexed as to what to do with them.

Of course, I understand that it's easy to judge these things from my laptop. I can't imagine how hard it is to actually pull the trigger on something like The Green Lantern, and wonder if you might be better off just lighting millions of dollars on fire. Hell, Cinematical readers can barely decide how Superman should be rebooted, how can you have confidence in ever winning over millions of fans? I can see how they have let themselves become trapped in an agony of indecision.

But if I was to offer some tentative, uneducated advice – I'd tell them to take a risk. The risks (300, Christopher Nolan, even Watchmen) have paid off in terms of fan and industry credibility. They're riding high right now and with Harry Potter and The Dark Knight, they've got money to burn. If anything, that's where their instincts lie -- look at Jonah Hex. That's a DC property I wouldn't have expected to see out of a studio until they had run the Big Ones into the ground, but it's one of the first DC characters getting shoved out of the gate. It's gone from a "Jonah who now?" to a "I can't wait for that one!" for a lot of people.

So, take a risk. Hold your breath, pick a Green Lantern, and jump. Greenlight (really greenlight) Wonder Woman. Run wild with Supermax. Find yourself another Christopher Nolan. Just go for it. Being risky doesn't necessarily mean being stupid – in fact, if it sounds too good to be true (Halle Berry as Catwoman) then it's probably too terrible for human eyes to endure. In fact, the best thing to do seems to be to hand a Christopher Nolan or a Zack Snyder a lot of money, and just walking away to let them do as they will. It's a matter of public record now what studio interference has done to other superhero franchises, so you know what not to do.

Whatever Warner Bros does, they've got to do it soon. If they want to be the risk taker that makes Jonah Hex and Watchmen over Superman and Green Lantern, I say go for it. Not every studio needs to trot out the icons and with Fox, Sony, and Marvel Entertainment shoving out another character, it might be really nice to have a big player who hangs back from the massive superhero game.

But, if they want to get into it, they've got to pull the trigger. If their superheroes continue in a state of suspension, the studio will completely miss the zeitgeist. Every trend burns out, and comic books are a trend like any other. You may have a few standby characters like Batman that can keep chugging along and knock out a movie every two or three years, but the frenzied assembly line can't continue.

In retrospect, this is a column that might be read as a lot of fan nitpicking and geeky greed. I don't intend it to at all -- in fact, my admiration for Warner Bros has continued to grow over the past couple of years. That's why I'm so anxious to see what they do with their DC cast of characters, because whatever property they tackle, the fans generally win.

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