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Could Warner Bros finally match Marvel’s box office might with a mini-verse featuring Robert Pattinson’s caped crusader and Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck?
Where Marvel continues to revel in an orgy of interconnectedness, the imminent launch of new superhero shows on the Disney+ channel being perhaps the apex of this splurge of comic book joined-up thinking, DC seems hellbent on going in the opposite direction.
After 2017’s Justice League failed to leap tall buildings in a single bound and the previous year’s Suicide Squad slumped languidly into the shadows, Warner Bros’s subsequent DC movies have taken a narrower approach to world-building, with some success. Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam! all managed to engage audiences without cramming dozens of costumed crime fighters into the same movie. Freed from the need to maintain thematic integrity across multiple episodes, Warner’s superhero movies have finally found their feet. So much so that it is tempting to wonder if the long-mooted DC Extended Universe, always planned as a Marvel-aping excuse to cross-pollinate the publisher’s entire back catalogue, has already met an untimely demise. Continue reading...