Batman V Superman: 10 Positives For The Future Of The DCEU
A few rays of hope from a gloomy failure.
Batman V Superman is not a very good movie. I think we can all agree on that.
Exactly how not very good seems to vary from 'well, that was a bit of a disappointment' to 'oh God, no, make it stop!' but not very good it assuredly is. So, that throws a bit of a spanner in the works for the nascent DC Extended Universe, then?
Well, not necessarily. Batman V Superman may fail at what it sets out to do, but that doesn't mean that it's completely lacking in interesting plot threads, concepts, and characters, which could yet translate into something that actually works.
With David Ayer's Suicide Squad in post-production, Patty Jenkins currently filming Wonder Woman, and the two Justice League movies all set to go, there is no chance of Warner Bros. pulling the plug on the whole ambitious enterprise. All we can do now, then, is look for the positives in Batman V Superman and hope that they may point to a brighter future for DC.
This article contains spoilers for Batman V Superman (of course).
10. The Initial Pitch Is Still A Good One
When Warner Bros. wanted to take advantage of the success of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan was initially uninterested, at least until writer David S. Goyer came to him with a pitch to tackle the Man Of Steel in a different way. Goyer's concept - how would the ordinary world respond to the arrival of a being with godlike superpowers? - proved interesting enough to get Nolan on board and to reboot the Superman franchise.
Even though Goyer's eventual script meandered through far too many themes and characters to work entirely, this idea remained solid - a thread of Lois Lane investigating Superman's arrival clearly suggests a more interesting movie in which she is the viewpoint character and the hero is seen from the outside.
In some ways proving more of a direct sequel than many anticipated, Batman V Superman picked up this concept with a pitch of 'and now how does an existent street level masked vigilante respond to the arrival of a genuinely super-powered superhero?' Once again, the movie as a whole was too messy to work completely, but these elements of Superman from Batman's point of view worked.
For all the movie's broader faults, the Batman arc of his responses to Superman created a story that made sense of why he would go from a vigilante hiding in Gotham's night to being a protector of the whole world.
If the Justice League movies can develop this thread - ultimately being a story of how a world that has become used to Superman being there deals with things when he isn't - then that would be a pretty good starting point.