Marvel and Disney really do have a lot to answer for.
Considering how they managed to put the idea of an interconnected series of movies together and made it look relatively simple, it kicked off Warner Bros. to do the same and we ended up with a five-minute segment in the middle of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice that introduced characters who weren't even in the film - oh, and Suicide Squad.
To say that the DCEU (which isn't the official term that Warner Bros. and don't even like for that matter) hasn't gone according to plan is a bit of an understatement. Given the pummelling Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman received, and how Wonder Woman was received with open arms, it looks Warner Bros. might finally have cottoned on to the fact that maybe - just maybe - people want a good story and a good fllm rather than some interconnected franchise-building exercise.
Vulture reports in a special feature that Warner Bros. is now putting the DCEU interconnection thing on ice, with DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson explaining that the plan is to use "the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn't make sense, but there's no insistence upon an overall story line or interconnectivity in that universe."
Not only that, the standalone run of movies - beginning with the Joker origins story nobody asked for - is happening, and will be announced officially pretty soon. According to Vulture's report, the idea is to make "stand-alones based on good ideas from big-name filmmakers. Movies that are just movies, not components of a larger piece of clockwork."
This tracks with rumours that Warner Bros. are looking at a possible adaptation of Red Son, the limited-run comic series which saw baby Superman land in the Soviet Union, not rural Smallville and be raised as a Communist superhero. Whether this all works out for Warner Bros. and DC remains to be seen, as there's no guarantee audiences will go along with standalone movies like this - even if they are made by top-tier filmmakers.
Either way, don't be in the least bit surprised if Justice League is a one-and-done crossover movie for DC.
Via Vulture
