Should DC/WB just give up on making comic-book movies?

[maasaloo]

I want more DC movies but the overboard serious gritty/dark stuff from Goyer/Nolan/Snyder is not my thing. I am really looking forward to Justice League Dark, Del Toro is amazing.

That could be a while though. Del Toro is working on a few different projects last news from him about it was that he's got a basic outline and they are looking for writer to come in and finish it off. But that was a few months back. Could be a few years before we even hear WB have green lighted the project.

[President_Luthor]

The studios giving up would be the last thing most fans would want, even if BvS doesn't perform well in theatres. If they had taken that attitude in the aftermath of Batman and Robin and just dropped Bats, we would never have gotten Batman Begins let alone the Dark Knight trilogy. While several aborted Bats projects had to be parked in development hell before they settled on BB, "good things come to those who wait" seems to apply with the most recent Batman franchise.

I'd be in the camp that liked MoS, with some reservations. Reeve will always be 'my' Superman, at least sentimentally, but Cavill has earned the mantle to be Supes. Both Cavill (and earlier, Routh) received some unwarranted flack online in the lead up to their movies because some fans wanted Tom Welling to play the role. I never wanted TW to "play" Superman on film because I wanted his version of Clark to actually fulfill his destiny in his own TV series: SV ends when Clark becomes Superman (which it did). MoS might not replace Superman I or II in my eyes, but it doesn't mean I'd want them to stop making more films: Superman, JLA, etc.

Del Toro doing Justice League Dark sounds great. Let the speculative casting for Zatanna begin!

[Caught_In_The_Sun]

I liked MoS however I would have done JL first then solo movies of Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman and then JL II and other movies. A JL movie would have been huge and a great way to kick off the new DCCU. Oh well. MoS, the sequel with Batman, Wonder Woman + and then JL?

Probably will get slammed for saying it.

[DA_Champion]

I liked MoS however I would have done JL first then solo movies of Superman, Batman & Wonder Woman and then JL II and other movies. A JL movie would have been huge and a great way to kick off the new DCCU. Oh well. MoS, the sequel with Batman, Wonder Woman + and then JL?

Probably will get slammed for saying it.

That was kind of WB's original plan with justice league mortal.

[Backward Galaxy]

Del Toro doing Justice League Dark sounds great. Let the speculative casting for Zatanna begin!

I just assumed everyone wanted Jamie Alexander.

[Degobunny]

The studios giving up would be the last thing most fans would want, even if BvS doesn't perform well in theatres. If they had taken that attitude in the aftermath of Batman and Robin and just dropped Bats, we would never have gotten Batman Begins let alone the Dark Knight trilogy. While several aborted Bats projects had to be parked in development hell before they settled on BB, "good things come to those who wait" seems to apply with the most recent Batman franchise.

I'd be in the camp that liked MoS, with some reservations. Reeve will always be 'my' Superman, at least sentimentally, but Cavill has earned the mantle to be Supes. Both Cavill (and earlier, Routh) received some unwarranted flack online in the lead up to their movies because some fans wanted Tom Welling to play the role. I never wanted TW to "play" Superman on film because I wanted his version of Clark to actually fulfill his destiny in his own TV series: SV ends when Clark becomes Superman (which it did). MoS might not replace Superman I or II in my eyes, but it doesn't mean I'd want them to stop making more films: Superman, JLA, etc.

Del Toro doing Justice League Dark sounds great. Let the speculative casting for Zatanna begin!

Hmmm...Zooey Deschanel *runs out of thread before BG' s inevitable protest*

[Backward Galaxy]

Hmmm...Zooey Deschanel *runs out of thread before BG' s inevitable protest*

No objections.

[cksidekick]

Its just nice to see Im not the only one in love with her!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ttzWuaPGMo

[Kindoalkun]

Thanks all! Some good thoughts here. Starting to feel at home being a fellow "Smallville refugee," as DA so eloquently labeled it.

[DA_Champion]

Actually, even on this site, I checked the MoS thread and 85% of voters gave this movie a 7,8,9, or 10/10. There's been a huge amount of negativity, but it's coming from a minority of viewers.

Ultimately, Zach Snyder and David Goyer could have played it safe and made a creatively conservative movie like Captain America: The First Avenger, and fans would have been happy and this forum would probably be comatose since there'd be little to discuss. However, they tried something new and original. On the bright side, the movie brought new fans to Superman and completely dominated 2013 blu ray and DVD sales. On the downside, a lot of people didn't like the output and are letting the world know about it.

Spider Man is just as popular as Superman. They made a lacklustre Spider Man movie in 2012, and there wasn't nearly this level of discussion, on ksite or elsewhere.

2013 DVD and blue ray sales:
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/top...-blu-ray-discs
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/top...rs-dvd-blu-ray
MoS ahead of all genre movies except for the Hobbit. It's the type of movie that people want to watch multiple times.

It's something I've seen Snyder mention in an interview. When he discusses movies with Nolan, they both agree that safe movies can often get a better reception, but they don't stay with you afterwards. You forget about them.

[newbaggy]

That Zack Snyder interview was with the Japan Times. Here is the relevant quote:

For me, a good movie has a pokey feel, and its surface has sharp edges. It’s hard to hold in your hand, but fascinating to look at. The ‘Hollywood committee,’ on the other hand, is always trying to get rid of those edges, to make it softer, lighter, more palatable. Those movies are easier to sit through and accept but once the lights come on you’ve forgotten all about it. It winds up not moving you, and the experience doesn’t stay. The best movies are the ones that cut you a little. When I go to the movies, I hope to be moved. Otherwise, why bother?

Now given how critical I have been of Man of Steel, it might seem surprising when I say that I agree with everything Snyder said in that quote. However, talk is cheap, and Man of Steel does not remotely resemble the sort of genuinely interesting movie that he is talking about. It isn't a new or original take on the Superman story, it isn't "pokey" or moving and it didn't "cut" me at all. It annoyed me, but only because it wasted the potential in both characters and story that might have been realised by a genuinely fresh interpretation of the familiar Superman mythology.

What we got was something that looks exactly like it was made by Snyder's "Hollywood Commitee." Creatively, it was utterly safe and conservative - in its own way, as beholden to the Richard Donner movies as was Superman Returns. Even the Lois and Clark pilot took a more original approach than Man of Steel. At least that didn't simply take whole chunks out of the first two Superman movies, and rewrite them to fit in all the cliches of modern Hollywood movies (alienated loner hero, lots of punching, lots of smashing, lots of CGI explosions, lots of CGI of buildings being smashed/trashed/demolished, more punching, good-guy-kills-bad-guy-who-murdered-his-father, lots of military hardware, more CGI explosions, destruction of whole city blocks, etc.). Basically, Superman and Superman II remade for the Transformers audience at its least sophisticated. Christopher Nolan's Batman movies might not have always lived up to the claims made for them by their staunchest supporters, but Nolan credited the audience with the intelligence to deal with comic book stories as commentaries on fear, terror, the limits of justice, corruption, etc. With Snyder and Goyer taking the creative lead, we get nearly quarter of a billion dollars spent on a dim-witted action movie where even the action isn't particularly inventive or well-staged. The critic Mark Kermode has praised Nolan for being able to make arthouse movies cunningly disguised as Hollywood blockbusters (e.g. The Dark Knight, Inception). With Snyder, you get a "washed-out" colour palette. lots of hand-held camerawork and a few faux-Terrence Malick shots to try and give a smart arty/indie feel to a movie that, for the most part, resembles a bad Saturday morning cartoon.

Ultimately, movies are a form of commercial art, and being commercial successful (as they have to be - movie studios are not charities) should not be at the complete expense of art. Craig([KsiteTV) commented that DC/WB could continue to make comic book movies for the money and the buzz they generate. Commercially, that is correct, but is that all we want movies to be? Unscrupulous London tailors used to say "never mind the quality, feel the width" when trying to sell suits made from cheap, poor-quality cloth. "Never mind the quality, look at the effects" could be the motto for DC/WB as it looks set to use the "talent" (or lack of) of the Goyer/Snyder team to "tailor" a succession of artistically threadbare, big-budget blockbusters. In recent years, several movies and TV shows that revived/reinterpreted classic characters - everything from The Dark Knight to Doctor Who, Sherlock to Skyfall - gaining large audiences whilst also raising the bar artistically. Given the will, and the right creative team, Man of Steel could have done the same for Superman and his supporting cast - the potential was there. Sadly, I don't see people willing and able to turn great existing characters and situations into great movies, just DC/WB wanting to make money out of their intellectual property.

[BoyScout-ManOfTomorrow]

Well said newbaggy.

[Wellingismysuperman]

Never going to happen wb would lose a lot of money by abandoning the superhero cash cow .

[DA_Champion]

Basically, Superman and Superman II remade for the Transformers audience at its least sophisticated.

You lose a lot of credibility from an otherwise well-written post when you casually dismiss those with different tastes as unsophisticated heathens. I've had interest in the past in art snobs who can come in and eloquently articulate why fans of everything from Twilight to Transformers to Man of Steel are just plain dumb, but I've lost interest in it, quite recently. It's an extremely self-absorbed way of looking at things, it doesn't actually explain why and how there are differences in tastes. The people who enjoyed this movie are not in any way shape or form less intelligent than those who failed to enjoyed it. The person I watched the movie with has a career that involves running magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of chemically-complex gases at mixed temperatures ... maybe the reason that he hasn't solved every problem is that he's dumb: he enjoyed the movie.

This is aside from the fact that I don't think a single person here qualifies as a legitimate art snob. This is a Smallville site, which means we've all watched and enjoyed that show which was mediocre at best. I own the first 8 seasons on DVD. You even have your avatar dedicated to Smallville's later (weaker) seasons. You also openly admit to having enjoyed Sherlock Holmes and Skyfall, both popcorn blockbusters, which I personally found to be uninteresting power fantasies, and I was so unchallenged by them that I don't even remember the plots.

All of this is aside from the fact that prognostications of art snobs have a mixed historical track record. The same people who speak of Shakespeare as the apex of good writing are in fact the cultural descendants of those who denigrated Shakespeare in his time as too popular. When the novel first became popular in the 19th century it was denigrated as well, and it was said that the really wise got their artistic fix from paintings. At a McGill University convocation around 1930, the Dean of the Faculty of Music delivered a speech arguing that Jazz was not real music. 80 years later, the President of Harvard scolded Cornel West for teaching rap music -- I guess real renaissance men should only study Mozart. Within the movie industry, the correlation between movies becoming influential and iconic and movies winning top oscars is weak at best.

So forgive me for dismissing the snobbery, which in your case is explicitly undermined by the fact you have your own extremely popcorn-y tastes (e.g. Sherlock Holmes). It doesn't take away from the fact that a lot of people, many of whom are more intelligent, wise, sophisticate than either of us, enjoyed this movie. Your analysis also fails to explain why this movie has an nearly unprecedented level of discussion in the Nerdosphere a full 8 months after its release, nor does it explain the fact this movie has a very high demand for rewatch. It's not because "Superman is iconic", neither Superman Returns nor The Amazing Spider Man achieved either this level of discussion. The vague explanation here is in fact that there were story elements that simply failed to resonate with you, for whatever reason, that other people were moved by. The specific explanation would be identification of what those elements are. You've offered up the hypothesis that stupid, unsophisticated people who watch transformers enjoy CGI. Sorry: nope.

[maasaloo]

Well said newbaggy.

He basically called anyone who liked Man of Steel stupid. But then again me and all those who liked the film are stupid so maybe I'm getting confused.