Despite having a wealth of characters from the DC world, Warner Bros have only managed to make Batman profitable with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Catwoman had the wrong creative team and Superman Returns didn’t meet expectations. More recently they have been trying to follow Marvel’s road by having a team movie, the Justice League. However the main problems were that fans didn’t particularly want it, and neither did Australia.
From Variety:
“We’re not off the notion of a Justice League,” Robinov says. “There’s a massive interest and knowledge in the comicbook industry and it takes time to sort of catch up and understand the characters and the history, where they’ve intersected with each other and what their worlds are. That’s part of the education that we’re going through.”
“These are big, iconic characters,” [Greg] Noveck says. “So when you make them into a movie, you’d better be shooting for a pretty high standard. You’re not always going to reach it, but you have to be shooting for it. We’re going to make a Justice League movie, whether it’s now or 10 years from now. But we’re not going to do it and Warners is not going to do it until we know it’s right.“
This is the best thing that could happen. Batman and Superman already have their franchises (well Batman has anyway), so to cross them over and mix them up would be stupid and it wouldn’t work.
So where do DC and Warner Bros go from here?
“We’re having a lot of internal discussions on it,” Horn says. “We haven’t committed to any change at DC at this point,” adding that both Warners and DC are committed to turning “the properties into viable movie product in an intelligent way so that we introduce them like planes on a runway. They have to be set up the right way and lined up the right way and all take off one at a time and fly safe and fly straight.”
So they have decided to do what Marvel are doing. Marvel have launched Iron Man, rebooted The Incredible Hulk, and will soon be giving us Thor and Captain America. All of these will then join together for a big old bash in The Avengers movie in 2011.
DC’s first solo movie off the blocks will most likely be Green Lantern, which already has a script and is apparently ready to go.
