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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Axe
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The Axe
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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From the outside with no context, all we can see is that they canceled a movie starring a Latin American female lead, while simultaneously allowing the Ezra Millar Flash movie to proceed despite his insane, dangerous, violent, and illegal behavior. WB's PR department should have gotten out in front of this thing days ago, rather than allowing it to fester and generate this much animosity from everybody everywhere. If there's a legitimate reason why they canceled it, they need to say so. And honestly, "we thought it would be bad" is probably not a strong enough justification, considering they have allowed movies such as Batman and Robin and The Matrix 4 to be released to the public.
My reaction is WHAT DCEU? Its in shambles, everything's cancelled except the two things that are merely delayed for years, you've canned the actors of four out of six if it's existing top bill heroes and that somehow didn't include the one who was a fugitive from justice. just let it collapse into it's component parts and salvage what you can of solo projects or sell the whole thing to the Borg Disney and stand back.
They've had a few standalone or largely standalone films like The Batman, The Suicide Squad (aha! it's the 'The' that makes them work), Joker (damn, there goes the trend), Shazaam. The only ones connected to the larger DCEU that did well were Aquaman and Wonder Woman (but WW84 bombed). There's no trend, WB just seems to be flailing in the dark with no idea how to manage their properties.
I dunno what kind of faustian bargain Disney made, but Marvel's success seems to be unique. Everyone else who's tried to build a contiguous movie franchise has, at best, struggled. Sony managed two Venom movies before flubbing their "Spiderman Villains" universe with Morbius (and managed to kill their live action Spiderman series by trying to introduce the entire Sinister Six in The Amazing Spiderman 2). Last I heard the Fast and the Furious shared universe hasn't gone anywhere since Hobbes and Shaw. Universal has tried several times to get a shared Monster universe (first with Dracula Untold, then The Mummy). I can't tell if Spiral was trying to turn the Saw franchise into an expanded universe, but I haven't heard anything since. Haven't heard anything about the expanded John Wick universe... I dunno. Somehow Marvel has put out as many entries in their shared universe as other studios have tried getting a universe going.
DC started from a position of shame in the subject matter and blew their wad on the biggest characters and stories and speedran through them in three movies with no plan for the future. They only shed their shame of being comic book movies briefly for Aquaman, and looking back years later I don't actually think they did, they just saw Guardians of the Galaxy doing weird shit and tried to do the same, but for all the spectacle of that movie I can't for the life of me recall anything usefully specific of it.
Disney's plan could have failed badly, but DC's was doomed from the start.
That was my guess from the symbol, though the colors are slightly off. Might just be artistic license though.
Yes, Black Templars. It was announced: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2022/07/22/black-templars
Marvel's heroes are well known for their angst and drama. Their powers come with limitations; their responsibilities carry weight; they have real lives just as complex as their superheroic lives. That adapts well to the screen, where you need to have characters with realistic motivations and complications.
DC's heroes tend to be more straightforward (because, to be fair, their most prominent characters are older and borne of a different storytelling era than Marvel's). Easy to write comics for, harder to write compelling multi-film screenplays for.
That's not to say it can't be done. The various DC animated series prove that it can. But even there I think the episodic format works in its favor. It's just not easy to write feature films for those characters, especially those who can do almost anything and don't carry a lot of personal baggage (like Supes and Green Lantern). The original Superman film worked great largely on the strength of Chris Reeve's performance (I could probably say the same of the first Wonder Woman film and Gal Gadot), but the sequels struggled.
DC did have success with Batman, of course -- not coincidentally, the most realistic and down-to-earth of their troupe, with a dark past and complex motivations. Batman translates well to the big screen for similar reasons as the Marvel characters.
So, yeah, I'm not discounting the impact of poor management, poor advance planning, and all that. But I think there's something fundamentally different in the types of supers Marvel and DC put out that makes some of them easier to write for than others.
Powers &8^]
I think his logic is, why stop now? And the comic doesn't even mention anything about saving their reputation. It's going to be in the toilet for a good while still.
Yeah, Gabe delivers the final line with an angry face. He definitely isn't approving of any of their choices.
Sex appeal has an impact on sales. As does character raping an existing character. Make a new character if they want the character to be trans, not take an existing character. As long as they have good writers with a good story people will probably be interested in it or give it a try. At this point, the minute I see a gender swap, race swap or genital whole swap its a sign of a bad movie 9 times out of 10. Make new content and stand on it, don't change characters people have loved for 50+ years.
I also don't like to see characters with established histories essentially raped of their identity and turned into something else while wearing the skin of the original. Whatever they did to Batgirl, was so horrific WB took $100M loss rather than release it. Remember Superman stating "Truth, Justice and the American Way", well that had to go as did his US citizenship. A lot of people didn't like that including the artist who left after getting a shot at Superman when they did that. And now we got a new character Isom, that might be a new super hero universe of worth, not created by character rape but creating something new. Also because that artist didn't like the character rape of superman.
The logic for stopping is simple. The movie will cost more money to finish, promote, and distribute (be it via streaming or traditional theatrical model) The films reportedly did not screen well. Internal analyst have projected that even at its current price tag it will lose money. In that situation where you gain nothing by releasing the film, why would you? Just to appease a subset of snarky assholes online that will simply use the film's existence as confirmation that you are shit studio? Really trying to understand the upside of this philosophy that you are in a hole, you should just keep digging instead of trying something else.
It goes more down to WB's foray into DC. Some liked the darkness of the Snyderverse, I was in the /meh. Wonder Woman 1 was awesome and then came Wonder Woman 2 which was horrible. Batman, Joker and Suicide Squad were more /mehs. Aquaman was good. Shazam, arguably aimed at children it was a good popcorn movie. A lot of people are looking at WB and what they've done for movies, injecting unnecessary politics or bad writing and aren't happy with them.
Zaslav has been getting rid of the gunk and hopefully with a leaned down WB and DC, they'll get back to writing good content. I quit buying comics 8 years ago from Marvel and DC due to the writing and art. I'm personally hoping that a DC being run on profit rather than ideology will be good. I take the cancelling of Batgirl an extremely good sign.
edit: And I should add DC animated generally is pretty good. Not 10's but no 3's or less mostly mid to high, so DC has been doing very well there.