The Brave and the Bold News and Discussion Thread

[SwordOfMorning]

While it is relevant that The Flash’s Batman stuff looks a little mediocre visually Muschietti’s movies historically look pretty good. Mama and the It duology are perfectly competent looking films aesthetically and in terms of their VFX.

He’d comfortably be the worst director to do a major Batman film unless you’re counting Snyder. But he’d be fine, and I still don’t think this movie is gonna attract a lot more than ‘fine’.

 

[TMP98]

While it is relevant that The Flash’s Batman stuff looks a little mediocre visually Muschietti’s movies historically look pretty good. Mama and the It duology are perfectly competent looking films aesthetically and in terms of their VFX.

He’d comfortably be the worst director to do a major Batman film unless you’re counting Snyder. But he’d be fine, and I still don’t think this movie is gonna attract a lot more than ‘fine’.

I think one of the reasons i’m ok with this sounding so pedestrian so far is that we’re already getting a Batman saga with incredible craftsmanship and a take that aligns perfectly with everything I love about the character. Like, this movie mostly exists to set up a Batman for the Gunn JL, so as long as they don’t **** up the characterization of Bruce then it’ll have done its job

 

[Invader Joker]

While it is relevant that The Flash’s Batman stuff looks a little mediocre visually Muschietti’s movies historically look pretty good. Mama and the It duology are perfectly competent looking films aesthetically and in terms of their VFX.

He’d comfortably be the worst director to do a major Batman film unless you’re counting Snyder. But he’d be fine, and I still don’t think this movie is gonna attract a lot more than ‘fine’.

Heavily disagree with you on Mama lol Might have some of the ugliest visuals and special effects I've ever seen on a movie.

And I feel that yeah, you can make the IT movies argument but at the end of the day, the 200 million dollar blockbuster he just directed that has Batman at the forefront of it is probably a significantly better comparison as to how he'd actually tackle a Batman blockbuster. Like we don't have to look at the IT films to speculate how he'd do a Batman movie when we directly have a movie he made with 2 Batmen on it.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

I think one of the reasons i’m ok with this sounding so pedestrian so far is that we’re already getting a Batman saga with incredible craftsmanship and a take that aligns perfectly with everything I love about the character. Like, this movie mostly exists to set up a Batman for the Gunn JL, so as long as they don’t **** up the characterization of Bruce then it’ll have done its job

Yeah, I think the chances of this movie being super noteworthy or special are extremely slim. Would be happy to be wrong though.

 

[emc5466]

Muschietti is a journeyman director. Visually bland but gets things done on time and keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t cause a ruckus.

He’ll have a job for life.

 

[emc5466]

If it’s a general wb meeting, how do we know it’s not just for the IT Max show?

I think that’s already been filming for a while.

 

[Invader Joker]

Muschietti is a journeyman director. Visually bland but gets things done on time and keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t cause a ruckus.

He’ll have a job for life.

They had to delay The Flash twice to give time for VFX and it still came out bad enough even the positive reviews point it as a negative; I don't think you can call that particularly efficient.

 

[emc5466]

They had to delay The Flash twice to give time for VFX and it still came out bad enough even the positive reviews point it as a negative; I don't think you can call that particularly efficient.

I think that’s more the Zaslav regime refusing to spend the money on the cgi.

 

[Invader Joker]

I think that’s more the Zaslav regime refusing to spend the money on the cgi.

... based on what? The budget for that film would have to have been approved well before Zaslav (The film was greenlit back in 2020 after all) And it's been well documented the budget is around 200 million-220 million. Not to mention there's been zero reports of this movie suffering from budget cuts of any sort.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

They had to delay The Flash twice to give time for VFX and it still came out bad enough even the positive reviews point it as a negative; I don't think you can call that particularly efficient.

I feel you are wildly overestimating how much that is likely due to Muschietti. Any number of factors go into situations like that.

I may be wrong about this but the delay for VFX was in part due to the aftershocks of COVID delays on VFX houses.

 

[TMP98]

They had to delay The Flash twice to give time for VFX and it still came out bad enough even the positive reviews point it as a negative; I don't think you can call that particularly efficient.

Black Adam, Flash and Aquaman 2 were all delayed to give time to VFX work - it was because there were so many projects backlogged due to COVID

 

[SwordOfMorning]

It’s also not like Black Adam also didn’t look comparably bad. ZSJL is also enormously ugly even though I know not everyone agrees with that. I just think the CG heavy DC movies from the last while have been par if not a little uglier than Flash which makes it pretty clear it ain’t one guys fault.

 

[Invader Joker]

I feel you are wildly overestimating how much that is likely due to Muschietti. Any number of factors go into situations like that.

Unless there are reports that signal the contrary he's the director, the buck stops on him, and if the film had bad VFX it falls on him too. Working on the VFX for The Flash was 1/3 of the entire job on that movie. I really don't get why there's this sense of instantly jumping to his defense when it comes to the visuals of that film when as a director that was very obviously also part of his job.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

Unless there are reports that signal the contrary he's the director, the buck stops on him, and if the film had bad VFX it falls on him too. Working on the VFX for The Flash was 1/3 of the entire job on that movie. I really don't get why there's this sense of instantly jumping to his defense when it comes to the visuals of that film when as a director that was very obviously also part of his job.

Because there are a hundred massively relevant parties to this aspect other than the director? Particularly on a massive studio film?

 

[Invader Joker]

It’s also not like Black Adam also didn’t look comparably bad. ZSJL is also enormously ugly even though I know not everyone agrees with that. I just think the CG heavy DC movies from the last while have been par if not a little uglier than Flash which makes it pretty clear it ain’t one guys fault.

I reaaaally think The Flash looks demostrably worse than those films though. Black Adam received a lot of backlash, but when the trailers were coming out I don't remember a thousand comments over the bad VFX shown in them like it happened. You may think the VFX was as bad in those films (I don't) but like, one of those received attention over how bad the VFX was over its whole marketing campaign and the others didn't, so there's clearly a difference.

Because there are a hundred massively relevant parties to this aspect other than the director? Particularly on a massive studio film?

And has there been any indication whatsoever that any of those other parties had anything to do with how bad the visuals of The Flash are? Someone like Jon Watts or Peyton Reed can point out to how they were rushed by Marvel in their films. But Muschietti so far in his interviews has been priding himself on how the studio gave him all the resources he wanted and how they let him do pretty much whatever he wanted with as much time as he needed. He could be lying, but it's not like there's any internal story or something that shows he's lying or that contradicts his claims in any way.

 

[solidsnake86]

I'm very curious to see how this film does. I think WBD has a lot riding on the flash film financially which will have a ripple effect on its remaining projects for the year in terms of marketing spend.

If the film makes less or around the same as the batman I also have a hard time seeing how executives would be so willing to set up a competing batman franchise that, with all do respect, had diminishing returns the last time it was tried with batman forever and subsequently batman and robin.

With the BATB, I'll believe it when I see it. As much it's a great concept, I think it has too many factors working against it right now and if this "comic book movie fatigue" becomes the phrase for explaining poor films then we will see.

 

[Invader Joker]

I'm very curious to see how this film does. I think WBD has a lot riding on the flash film financially which will have a ripple effect on its remaining projects for the year in terms of marketing spend.

If the film makes less or around the same as the batman I also have a hard time seeing how executives would be so willing to set up a competing batman franchise that, with all do respect, had diminishing returns the last time it was tried with batman forever and subsequently batman and robin.

With the BATB, I'll believe it when I see it. As much it's a great concept, I think it has too many factors working against it right now and if this "comic book movie fatigue" becomes the phrase for explaining poor films then we will see.

I think the success or lack thereof of Brave and the Bold will be largely dependant on how it stacks up in terms of quality next to the other Batman films that have been released in the last 20 years... AKA the Nolan and the Reeves films.
Which by no means is an easy task.
If it looks up there in terms of quality in the marketing material and such, I do think audiences will respond to it.
If it just looks like The Flash or Shazam 2 but with Batman at the forefront, then yeah the film will be ****ed because as seen in how The Flash is tracking you can't just put Batman in a movie (even a succesful Batman) and expect it to immediately do big numbers.

If The Flash does as poorly as projected I think that Gunn and Safran will need to look at that as an indication they need to dream bigger.

I know that the consensus is that this film will just be kinda like the Batman side-project that doesn't need to be that good or something, but that's kinda the exact mentality that DC Studios shouldn't have if they want this film to be anything near a success. The mentality that you can just treat these films as disposable and expect them to do great is the exact thing that's kinda causing "superhero fatigue" to be kicking in a bit.

 

[Invader Joker]

We can do better. A lot better.

 

[antsman41]

The notion that they utterly whiffed it on Keaton is the biggest disgrace no matter what angle or lighting situation, it looks like the Halloween version of a Burton suit.

Let alone that debacle Affleck is wearing above.

 

[BatsAndNights]

Ultimately they need to genuinely stop trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to adding extra stuff to the batsuits in particular.

The conventional batsuit hasn't changed much since the 70s (beyond a few colour changes) for a reason. It's timeless. It works. All you need to do is adapt that, change the material wholesale to something that visually makes sense in live action and you're golden.

It's when you start adding random shoulder pads and chest guards on top of the existing suit, along with just flat out lighting the suit absolutely abysmally that you take that timeless design and make it look like actual garbage. Like


Just take the random extra stuff off. And it looks fine. But with it added, it looks apocalyptically goofy. It's exactly why the batsuits in The Flash look bad (along with the fitting for Keaton's suit being the actual worst I've ever seen), TDK suit looks bad, the Schumacher suits look bad and so on. They all try to just add random stuff on top of the batsuit that just don't need to be there and aren't integrated properly.

 

[antsman41]

He looks like when in the 80's they tried selling tight underclothes to hid your flab.

 

[Boom]

The costumes in The Flash are so terrible it almost has to be intentional.

 

[Invader Joker]

"The cinematography on The Flash looks terrible"
-It's not Muschietti's fault!
"The VFX on The Flash looks terrible"
-It's not Muschietti's fault!
"The costume design on The Flash looks terrible..."


There is genuinely zero reason to believe that a Muschietti Batman movie would look or be any better.

 

[Eddie Dean]

Frankly I do not care about Brave and Bold because I have a better Batman franchise that’s also happening right now.

so sure, get Andy to direct, get McG, who cares

 

[BatsAndNights]

Frankly I do not care about Brave and Bold because I have a better Batman franchise that’s also happening right now.

so sure, get Andy to direct, get McG, who cares

I feel this on some level, but also Brave and the Bold is an opportunity to essentially adapt the other side of the coin when it comes to Batman, that Matt Reeves simply isn't really touching on. The slightly more fantastical and comic-booky elements. I'm ride or die Reeves, that much should be obvious to anyone who's seen my borderline essays on why The Batman's my favourite movie of all time. The man's my comic adaptation lord and saviour. But it'd definitely be a missed opportunity if they mess this up. Am I going to be all that heartbroken? Not really, because I'll have what I truly love about the character coming from another avenue to look forward to. But it'd still be nice to see them get this right so we get to see that other side to this character.