4. Hit A Big Event First
The rather unfortunate thing about DC's entrenched battle with Marvel is that Marvel can rely on a number of big narrative events to play key parts in their forthcoming Phases. With the Avengers thread already established, Marvel could now branch off into Civil War, or Infinity or even the Zombies narrative (which they probably won't) and they will have stolen a march on their rivals. The race towards a big comic book event could well be one of the defining elements that we see in forthcoming comic book movies, like a furious arms race, because whoever comes second will look like the reactive party, or the copy-cat, no matter how unique the actual content of the story arc is. It may sound a little petty, but if DC can find a way to launch immediately into Darkest Night, or Crisis On Infinite Worlds, and trust that audiences will respond positively to a story without the usual steps of origin and development, they would be scoring a victory against Marvel in audiences' eyes. That would also solve the problem of having to reboot or tell origins stories for all of the involved characters, which could put DC some distance behind Marvel in terms of their progress.