Kevin Smith Hints At DC Cinematic Universe Plans
By Steve Lam
On Hollywood Babble-On‘s May 23, 2014 podcast, Kevin Smith dropped a few hints about Warner Brother’s DC cinematic universe plans. During his Geek News segment, Smith said that WB/DC is taking a different approach to what Disney/Marvel has done. Instead of having sequels to a character-based movie, there will be movies that have these characters in them that don’t necessarily continue a certain character’s story. With each subsequent release of a Justice League movie, the universe will get bigger and bigger. Smith’s exact words were:
"And so, this is the beginning of the Justice League — as we all suspected as they were announcing that cast. It was like, “This is the beginning of the Justice League movie.” From what I understand now, it’s no longer like, “This is Superman 2.” They’re not doing these things. They’re doing like, “Here’s Man of Steel. Here’s Batman/Superman: Dawn of Justice.” The next one is not like a sequel to one of the characters. They’re just going to keep building their universe for about five or six movies … It’s suppose to tell one massive story which is all Justice League-oriented."
This is certainly very different to Disney’s approach in their Marvel Cinematic Universe where each phase had a movie dedicated to a character. And at the end, the phase would be capped off with an ensemble movie. The biggest question in people’s minds will be “How does one develop characters with such a large cast?” Something like this could work, though, if they followed a template similar to feature-length cartoons like Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox — where the movie had a large cast, but it was centered around The Flash. This would also wipe out any origin-story-doldrums that people have come to detest.
It still remains to be seen how accepting the audience will be. I’m all for new approaches to storytelling. However, things like this could either be an ingenious move where you get results similar to The Avengers, X-Men: First Class, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Or they could result in disasters like Batman and Robin and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Let’s hope Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice can satisfy audiences’ appetites without giving them bloat and indigestion.