10 Radical Ideas To Save The DC Extended Universe
1. The Crisis On Infinite Earths
I’m not the only one who’s speculated that the DCEU is gently rolling towards a version of the most seminal, epic crossover event in the history of superhero comics. That’s right: it’s Maximum Carnage.
No, only joking. That was sh*tbox. Crisis On Infinite Earths was the first ever major comics crossover, celebrating fifty years of DC Comics (dating back to the February 1935 first issue of New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine, when the company was called National Allied Publications, for those of you obsessed with trivia).
The idea was that the continuity of so many titles and characters with a shared history, written by so many people over so many years, styles and eras of comic books had created this massive, unwieldy mess that needed restructuring, pruning and culling. In the story, DC’s multiverse was being erased by a sinister cosmic entity, and only the combined forces of… well, everyone, could stop it. Yes, it’s far more complicated than that, and no, you don’t need to know.
It was seminal stuff, and changed the face of DC and comics in general forever. It’s not dated very well as a piece of comics literature, and editorial confusion kind of messed up what they were trying to execute - but the principles are still sound, and still being used today.
If this was planned from the start - and there are enough parallels between Crisis and the current DCEU to make you wonder - then it’s a brilliant, if convoluted answer to all the DCEU’s critics. If not… well, it’s an excellent ‘new broom’ style twist to remove all of the godawful elements of current DCEU continuity, when they ultimately realise that Zack Snyder is a gormless turd of a man with a skull full of curdled milk.
Either way, the effect would be the same. It would allow for a fix of the current, enormously unpopular version of Superman. It would allow for a revision of the current, middle-aged Batman to a younger iteration, preferably with an entirely different Joker that didn’t look like a try-hard Juggalo.
It might also allow for a reboot of the Suicide Squad to a form that makes sense and a version of Deadshot that doesn’t make me want to eat my own face, but that’s not quite as urgent a revision as the rest...
How would you go about saving the DCEU, or do you think it's fine as it is? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.