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As I write this we are approximately one month out from the Suicide Squad movie upon which DC and WB
have hung their collective hopes for a cinematic universe. We’re all still reeling from the sucker
punch that was Batman v. Superman
ending up something closer to a fever dream farce than a solvent blockbuster
and even though the slow drip of new information on WB’s prospective slate of
future superhero blockbusters has been encouraging there’s a lot of uncertainty
going forward.
It’s starting to seem more and more like Batman films really
are the only superhero movies that WB can actually do well, a concept which got
me thinking. If WB is so committed
to its Batman franchise they’re willing to constantly run back to the Bat well
when things get rough, why not just cut out the middleman and produce a Batman
shared movie universe.
From the outset I understand why some people might have some
reticence to this idea. The DC
stable of heroes is massive and full of a ton of great characters that could
make great movies that we haven’t seen yet, whereas we’ve now had 8-9 Batman
movies, 3 live action series, and a ton of cartoons and video games. That’s a fine point and I know there
are a ton of DC characters I’d love to see get adapted but that list is actually
getting shorter now thanks to the efforts of the CW.
Starting around 2015 CW’s collection of superhero shows and
character adaptations have grown to rival that of Marvel Studios, an incredible
roster of characters that adapt classics like Firestorm expertly, perfect
flawed concepts like the Atom, and even managed to redeem the universally
disliked Vibe, turning him into the breakout character of The Flash. Honestly,
at this point CW is doing an infinitely better job at bringing DC’s characters
to life than the films are, especially now that they’re over Supergirl and have their own team show
with Legends of Tomorrow.
Additionally, something to remember about the Batman we’ve
grown to associate with the character is that it’s a very narrow conception of
him. Batman has existed for over
75 years and in that time has been re-imagined and reworked countless times and
of those times only a fraction has been adapted to screen. The Batman most people tend to know is
a thoroughly stripped down iteration of the ‘80s Batman to arise out of Frank
Miller’s Year One comic. The grim, taciturn rich kid who goes
out and beats up the less fortunate between his throw downs with villains so
violent and evil they’d pass for Slasher villains. That’s the popular view of Batman but it’s hardly the
definitive one.
The Batman of the ‘40s morphed from a stark crime killer to
a smiling father figure and war hero.
In the ‘50s he took on alien invaders, creatures from other dimensions,
and all matter of other strange surrealism. By the ‘60s Batman had become the paterfamilias to a whole
Bat family of crime fighters in the vein of a sitcom set-up with Robin,
Batgirl, Batwoman, and Ace the Bat hound.
1970s Batman was a globetrotting super spy, facing off against villains
more prepared to face James Bond than a man dressed as a bat.
This was the era Batman even created his own team of global
crime fighters but we’ll come back to that. As often as ‘80s Batman fought crime and corruption he’d go
head-to-head with Russian super assassins or the dark supernatural nature of
the city. In the ‘90s Batman faced
down threats on the scale of massive disasters like plagues and earthquakes
while 2000s Batman was like a Zen warrior, constantly prepared and
unflappable.
My point is that
Batman has been so many things, embody so many character archetypes and genres,
that he’s an infinitely versatile character and could be adapted in an infinite
number of ways. All of which is a
good argument for more Batman films, perhaps arranged like the rebooted X-Men films moving through various
decades, but his vast history also means that there are a vast number of heroes
tied to Batman’s mythos.
The large number of characters that are covered under
Batman’s umbrella is one of the biggest side effects of Batman’s massive
success through the decades. Not
only does the list of heroes extend to the standard array of Batman related
spin-off characters, but it’s also come to include any character with a connection
to Gotham City.
For instance, the
obvious line-up of Batman characters that could work in a film are folks like
Robin, Batgirl, Catwoman, Batwoman, Huntress, and the Red Hood. However, Batgirl later became Oracle
and set-up the Birds of Prey along with Huntress and Black Canary, which lands
all of them under the Batman umbrella and even partially includes Green
Arrow.
Meanwhile, Batwoman is the ex-girlfriend of Renee Montoya,
ex-Gotham cop and current incarnation of the Question, making the Question part
of the Batverse. Speaking of ex-cops,
the various hosts of the Spectre, a ghostly spirit of heavenly vengeance, were
all Gotham cops prior to their death so the Spectre becomes another part of the
Batman hero list. Other heroes of
the 1940s who’ve become part of the broader Batman oeuvre are Wildcat, a boxer
and ex of Catwoman’s, and Alan Scott Green Lantern, who used to work out of
Gotham City.
That’s already a huge amount of characters without even
touching on the various teams Batman has put together. Aside from the Birds of Prey,
Batman also founded the Outsiders as a globetrotting superhero black ops team
and later launched Batman Incorporated to support various vigilantes
worldwide. The entire structure of
a shared universe is predicated on character and concept crossovers to facilitate
a cross-pollination of interest between the various properties.
That’s part of why Marvel weaves their larger stories
through all of their movies, in the hopes that the cameos and shout outs will
translate to engagement or even hype for their other projects. Building teams and exploring their
individual members is a great way to do this and the idea of having Batman pop
up to recruit people would be a great way to get folks to actually see films about
more obscure heroes like Black Lightning or Mr. Unknown. I mean, Marvel was able to wrangle a
hit film out of Ant-Man and it’s biggest cameo was the Falcon so I think DC
could use Batman to boost audience interest in like a Batwing movie or
something.
Conversely, the other way to create the kind of cross-media
hype of that sustains a superhero franchises is with big, long form story
sagas. That’s why we’re 12 movies
into the Marvel universe and we’re still building up the Thanos/Infinity Gems
arc or why Jean Grey is already experiencing Phoenix flashes in X-Men: Apocalypse.
In the case of Batman, the caped
crusaders has been thrown into a plethora of large scale, event sized threats
ever since 1989’s Batman movie proved
he was a solvent property. Ideas
like Wargames, a massive gang war
tearing the city apart, or No Man’s Land,
an Earthquake leads to Gotham being deemed no longer part of the US, or even Knightfall, where Batman’s back is broke
and he’s replaced by a religious fanatic, could work as slow drip story
set-ups. What’s more, Batman’s
rogues gallery provides a lot of possibilities for villainous masterminds or
looming threats from Ras Al Ghul to the Black Glove.
I haven’t even approached the concept of giving Batman
villains spin-off movies. Bat foes
like Red Hood and Anarchy could work as flawed and brutal anti-heroes while
some Batman villains like Man-Bat and Riddler have actually transitioned to be
heroes for a time.
The most
obvious transition from Bat foe to quasi-heroic character comes with Deadshot
in, of course, the Suicide Squad.
That leads me to the biggest reason I think a Batman shared universe
makes sense: they’re already building one. The current set-up of the DC movieverse is already
predicated on Batman showing up in a bunch of movies to collect the Justice
League members we saw in Batman v.
Superman. They’re even fitting
Batman into Suicide Squad along with
a ton of his bad guys who aren’t traditional members of the team like Joker,
Harley Quinn, and Killer Croc.
That’s the same reason Commissioner Gordon is going to be in
the Justice League movie or why the Batman movie WB is building up to has been
frontloaded with 4 Oscar winners.
The only difference is that this means Batman-ifying various properties
that don’t need to be Batman’ed.
We’ve already seen what happens when Batman’s aesthetic and trappings
are slathered over Superman in both Man
of Steel and Dawn of Justice and
I really don’t want to imagine that same fate befalling Flash, Aquaman, and
Wonder Woman. It’s still possible
those movies will be good and I like a lot of the creative teams involved but
at this point it seems like it’d just be easier to stop taking chances on WB
finally getting their head out of Gotham City; if that’s where they want to be
we may as well enjoy it.
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