Batman V Superman: 10 Positives For The Future Of The DCEU
3. It's Not Obssessed With Origin Stories
A lot of fans were frustrated that Batman V Superman promised to give us yet another version of Batman's murdered parents backstory. It's something that we all know, and most of us are pretty bored of seeing repeated again and again.
However, the film actually handled this pretty well, using it as a sort of 'previously' recap over the opening credits (a la Incredible Hulk or Spider-Man 3) rather than an extensive retelling. For the most part, the movie gave us an established Batman and let us fill in the backstory for ourselves. A later flashback to his parents' death filled relevant part of the narrative in serving to remind the two heroes of their shared experience and humanity (and mother's name), and so diffuse the titular showdown.
In this way, the movie's Batman story happily recalls Tim Burton's original Batman in which the Caped Crusader was already operating on the streets of Gotham and his backstory was only filled in as it connected to the story of The Joker (whatever you think of that change from the source material, it made for a streamlined film narrative).
Given that the other DCEU heroes and villains are set to first appear in Justice League or Suicide Squad respectively, this seems likely to be the template for the franchise as it goes on: characters established in their well known personas with potentially a bit of flashback origin when it is relevant to the current plot. This lack of a need to make every character's movie primarily an origin story with a brief climactic confrontation is a blessed relief after years of that being the superhero movie formula.
Sure, Marvel have promised to cut back on the origin stories too, but their next new hero - Doctor Strange - clearly still has a movie that fits the origin formula and if the solo Spider-Man film has as little of Uncle Ben's death as Batman V Superman had of the Waynes' then it will be doing well.