The Dark Knight’s box-office records notwithstanding, DC Comics and their home movie studio, Warner Brothers, haven’t had great success with the plethora of properties at their fingertips. Superman and Batman are clearly the iconic characters in the DC universe, but there are many other heroes that could support a movie (or two.) DC and WB have, for whatever reason, not been able to match the success of Marvel in getting more of their hero stable onto the silver screen.
The studio and the comic book company recognize their failure and recently held some meetings with the intention of putting together a strategy on releasing more superhero movies tapping into characters like Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and the other members of the Justice League. Now, Variety reports that WB will probably have some information on upcoming DC-based projects within the next month.
In reality, the article doesn’t have any real information other than WB wants to have more DC movies… sometime. WB President Alan Horn says they want to turn comic heroes ”into viable movie product in an intelligent way so that we introduce them like planes on a runway. They have to be set up the right way and lined up the right way and all take off one at a time and fly safe and fly straight." That sounds great, but meanwhile Marvel has Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers in the works while DC can’t get Wonder Woman or the Flash into movie theaters to save their lives.
It seems to all come back to that never ending soap-opera, the Justice League movie. Working all the movies together so that a film about the Justice League makes sense is proving to be a big challenge. About the difficulty in putting together a movie about the superhero group, WB production exec Jeff Robinov said, "There's a massive interest and knowledge in the comicbook industry and it takes time to sort of catch up and understand the characters and the history, where they've intersected with each other and what their worlds are. That's part of the education that we're going through." Ok, but can’t we get something with Flash or Green Lantern, maybe even one of my favorites, The Atom? Well, yes, but who knows when. DC executive Gregory Noveck leaves us all hanging with, "These are big, iconic characters, so when you make them into a movie, you'd better be shooting for a pretty high standard. You're not always going to reach it, but you have to be shooting for it. We're going to make a Justice League movie, whether it's now or 10 years from now. But we're not going to do it and Warners is not going to do it until we know it's right." I’m not even betting on the 10 years.
