What If DC Had Made A Cinematic Universe Before Marvel?

The Wider Cinematic Influences

Now we've looked at how things could go, it's worth considering the wider implications. After all, the superhero genre exploded at the time of a major shift in blockbuster cinema, something it's gone on to influence in many distinct ways.

There's plenty of things that wouldn't change, of course. The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter would still happen, bringing about a push for fantasy and leading the way for the majority in blockbusters in terms of approach to material, and it's likely certain trends would run in the same way. But there are some likely shifts.

The immediate casualty of the DCCU is The Dark Knight Trilogy, which was born entirely out of the complete failure of Batman And Robin. This is a landmark series that gave us a serious, grounded Batman and explored the very ethos of the character in expertly made films, and to lose that is certainly tragic. Although it's perhaps it's own influence that's more important.

A turn into darker, more mature films was inevitable given wider societal shifts; Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are often cited as the instigators, but they're really just the accelerators. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have become so popularised without them, so in a world with the DCCU (which you envisage would have remained lighter even if it did go "dark"), blockbusters may not have gone quite so brooding.

The big shift would be in how superheroes are popularised. Due to the Marvel right's sale a boom of movies about spandexed heroes in the early-naughties was inevitable, but the impact would be different if the DCCU was up-and-running. There'd be no real gap between the likes of Spidey and Hulk from the previous era of the Reeve/Keaton films, and because of that we'd likely see is the popularisation of comic book tropes in wider cinema happening faster (shared universes would become the go-to five-to-ten years earlier). However, because we're following on from the Burton/Schumacher Batman run, which wasn't all that faithful, things would be more inaccurate. And with that potentially comes a decrease in the popularisation of geek culture and thus falls our current obsession with old franchises.

Of course, it's impossible to say with certainty - the development of film is so complicated - but it's safe to say that if DC had got there first, we'd have a cinematic landscape at once familiar and alien. It would see a world where Batman 1989 is essential rewatch material and Nic Cage's Superman stands alongside Keaton/Clooney at the forefront of the genre. It would have put Marvel severely on the backfoot and altered our approach to pop culture. It would have been different, but who knows if it would have been better (probably not given it was running from Batman And Robin).

What this consideration really does, however, is highlight how complicated a road it's been to get to the point we're at now, and that a couple of the cancelled projects - Green Arrow: Escape From Super Max, Justice League Mortal, Edgar Wright's Ant-Man - could have completely changed things.

What do you think would have happened if DC had got a shared universe off the ground first? Share your thoughts down in the comments.