DC Films The DC Studios News and Discussion Thread

[Primal Slayer]

Either way i dont want a half baked reboot. Give me a full or none. You want a younger Superman? Ok then I need everyone younger. None of this "what works" crap that James has been saying so he can keep his SS peeps in tact.

I think this is the great myth of the DCEU. The general public loves Cavill as Superman - then why did no one show for Justice League or Black Adam? The general public loves Gadot as Wonder Woman - then why did no one show up for Justice League or WW1984? The general public loves Robbie as Harley - then why did no one show up for Birds of Prey or Suicide Squad.

Why DID people show up for The Batman and Joker? That's your answer...

Small but vocal fanbase. The case for a complete reboot makes itself.

Because people were dying? Im not sure why we, especially with 84 continue to act like this wasnt THE MAJOR FACTOR and attempt to ignore that 84 was the top selling film in blu/dvd in 2021 and a top streamer for HBOMax. Where...ya know it streamed same day, in the safety of our houses.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

I think this is the great myth of the DCEU. The general public loves Cavill as Superman - then why did no one show for Justice League or Black Adam? The general public loves Gadot as Wonder Woman - then why did no one show up for Justice League or WW1984? The general public loves Robbie as Harley - then why did no one show up for Birds of Prey or Suicide Squad.

Why DID people show up for The Batman and Joker? That's your answer. Small but vocal fanbase. The case for a complete reboot makes itself.

The DCEU has not had a hit since 2018. You can blame the pandemic, but that's bookmarked by DC's only two successes since 2018 - both of which are outside the DCEU.

I hope DC has finally realised that the actual people who make this movie a success are not the few thousand who tweet about it forty times a day.

Justice League was a terrible film that wasn't marketed all that hard and a sequel to one of the most hated major studio releases of the 2010s and WW84 could not have had a worse release date in the entire history of film.

Gadot and especially Momoa are popular as their characters in a way no one else in the DCEU is. Your overall point stands, stuff like Cavill (or Affleck as Batman for that matter) being popular or even noteworthy among the GA is straight up delusional, but clearly Gadot and Momoa are something different.

 

[Invader Joker]

The wrinkle here is... Gal is going to pop up twice this year in two DC movies so IF they are getting rid of her they're definitely going to wait until Flash is done. I agree with you guys that without Jenkins and Pine Gal is going to be handicapped but the general public seems to have taken a liking to her as far as her mainstream popularity as Wonder Woman. Her firing could cause a lot of upset that WB doesnt want...but then again maybe Gunn is bold enough to brave the hit and convinced his bosses it'll all be worth it.

Also word on the street is tomorrow they're going to do a big press announcement about the DC plans but they're going to hold off on announcing it until Tuesday.

Word on the street by who?

 

[TheScarecrow]

Justice League was a terrible film that wasn't marketed all that hard and a sequel to one of the most hated major studio releases of the 2010s and WW84 could not have had a worse release date in the entire history of film.

Gadot and especially Momoa are popular as their characters in a way no one else in the DCEU is. Your overall point stands, stuff like Cavill (or Affleck as Batman for that matter) being popular or even noteworthy among the GA is straight up delusional, but clearly Gadot and Momoa are something different.

Because people were dying? Im not sure why we, especially with 84 continue to act like this wasnt THE MAJOR FACTOR and attempt to ignore that 84 was the top selling film in blu/dvd in 2021 and a top streamer for HBOMax. Where...ya know it streamed same day, in the safety of our houses.

I take your point on the release date, and the HBO Max release.

However, numbers don't lie:

Tenet (released 3 September 2020) - $58.5m domestic, $306.8m , $365.3m global.
The Croods: A New Age (released 25 November 2020) - $58.5m domestic, $157.3m international, $215.9m global.
Wonder Woman 1984 (released 25 December 2020) - $46.8m domestic, $122m international, $169.6m global.
Tom & Jerry (released 26 February 2021) - $46.5 domestic, $90m international, $136.5m global.
Godzilla v Kong (released 31 March 2021) - $100m domestic, $369.2m international, $470m global.

All of the last three were released simultaneously on HBO Max and in theatres. WW1984 was about as popular as Tom & Jerry. Keep in mind, there is no HBO Max in the vast majority of overseas locations.

 

[kguillou]

WW1984 was released in the heart of the pandemic and was also released on HBO Max simultaneously. I’m betting 90% us here on the hype watched it on HBO Max Christmas day. Under normal circumstances WW84 would have had a huge opening weekend. The wom after…well we’ll never know but the general public loves Gal as Wonder Woman and i’m willing to bet would still show up in droves for a third movie…provided it looks good. Gal has a built in audience. Starting fresh with someone new so soon runs the inherent risk of alienating said audience.

Henry Cavill has alot of hardcore fans but his popularity with Supes is night and day to Gal’a as Wonder Woman. Gal is legit loved by the general public as Wonder Woman, she made that role hers. Firing her is gonna cause a lot of blowback, waaayyyy worse than the blowback from Cavill’s firing. And maybe Gunn’s prepared for it, and if he is then power to him, but its gonna be rough.

 

[TheScarecrow]

WW1984 was released in the heart of the pandemic and was also released on HBO Max simultaneously. I’m betting 90% us here on the hype watched it on HBO Max Christmas day. Under normal circumstances WW84 would have had a huge opening weekend. The wom after…well we’ll never know but the general public loves Gal as Wonder Woman and i’m willing to bet would still show up in droves for a third movie…provided it looks good. Gal has a built in audience. Starting fresh with someone new so soon runs the inherent risk of alienating said audience.

My point is - that other films were released around the same time to higher grosses. And the HBO Max point doesn't stand because internationally that wasn't a factor. We were COVID zero here and people didn't show up.

 

[Invader Joker]

I take your point on the release date, and the HBO Max release.

However, numbers don't lie:

Tenet (released 3 September 2020) - $58.5m domestic, $306.8m , $365.3m global.
The Croods: A New Age (released 25 November 2020) - $58.5m domestic, $157.3m international, $215.9m global.
Wonder Woman 1984 (released 25 December 2020) - $46.8m domestic, $122m international, $169.6m global.
Tom & Jerry (released 26 February 2021) - $46.5 domestic, $90m international, $136.5m global.
Godzilla v Kong (released 31 March 2021) - $100m domestic, $369.2m international, $470m global.

All of the last three were released simultaneously on HBO Max and in theatres. WW1984 was about as popular as Tom & Jerry. Keep in mind, there is no HBO Max in the vast majority of overseas locations.

I find the GvK comparison extremely bizarre because who's to say that film wouldn't have cracked 700 million without the day and date release? Or 1.5 billion without the pandemic? Sure, you can point to it and say "WW84 didn't do as much as GvK did, therefore WW84 would've always been a failure" but we have literally zero frame of reference as to what GvK would've done without the pandemic or HBO MAX. It's an argument used for TSS too and it's pretty tired because we have zero idea what either of those numbers mean in this context.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

Subjective memory but I also recall people's willingness to go out in public veering wildly from month to month back then. Like the difference between December 2020 and March 2021 felt huge.

 

[Invader Joker]

Subjective memory but I also recall people's willingness to go out in public veering wildly from month to month back then. Like the difference between December 2020 and March 2021 felt huge.

People often point out to films released during the pandemic that flopped during it and try to brush them off as "Yeah there was the pandemic but ____ " as if it's not a "valid excuse" or something which is all sorts of misguided because it was literally a ridiculously complicated event that disrupted every single aspect of the industry and disrupted every single market in often extreme and unpredictable ways. You can't look at what a film did during the pandemic and act as if that gross is indicative at all of how it'd have performed in normal circumstances. There's a reason why even notorious penny pincher Zaslav didn't factor TSS's performance at all when hiring James Gunn to be CEO of DC Studios.

 

[flickchick85]

Yeah, people started to go back to theaters in 2021, fairly early. 2020 was still a total dead zone. And Tenet didn’t have the HBO Max factor. There is no comparison you can make to WW84 because it is an entirely unique case. It was the “guinea pig” for two tests at once.

“The numbers,” in this case, say nothing at all worth listening to.

 

[TheScarecrow]

I find the GvK comparison extremely bizarre because who's to say that film wouldn't have cracked 700 million without the day and date release? Or 1.5 billion without the pandemic? Sure, you can point to it and say "WW84 didn't do as much as GvK did, therefore WW84 would've always been a failure" but we have literally zero frame of reference as to what GvK would've done without the pandemic or HBO MAX. It's an argument used for TSS too and it's pretty tired because we have zero idea what either of those numbers mean in this context.

Well we do, because Godzilla v Kong is a sequel to three other films. We know its audience, broadly:

Godzilla (2014) - $220m domestic, $324m international, $524m worldwide.
Kong: Skull Island - $168m domestic, $398m international, $566m worldwide.
Godzilla 2 - $110m domestic, $276m international, $386m worldwide.

Godzilla v Kong's actual numbers weren't far removed from those. It certainly would have grossed more, but there's nothing to indicate it would have grossed more than $700-800m in normal times.

I'm not saying that the pandemic didn't have an impact - I'm saying that people use the pandemic and the HBO Max release to give WW1984 a complete pass on its reception. Objective evidence is that films in the same or similar position simply outgrossed it. It may not have been an absolute bomb, but the reception to the film, not to mention the muted response to JL16 and ZSJL, indicate Gal's popularity as WW peaked in 2017.

Spoiler

The good news is we have more test cases coming up - lets see if people show up to Shazam 2 to see Gal. My suspicion is that you get a lot of twitter noise that translates into very limited box office reciepts.

 

[Primal Slayer]

v

My point is - that other films were released around the same time to higher grosses. And the HBO Max point doesn't stand because internationally that wasn't a factor. We were COVID zero here and people didn't show up.

You're point is still flawed. Tenet was not released same day streaming. Croods was not released same day streaming. Not to mention how things were continuing to shut down even a month later.

GvK also had a whole vaccine that was rolling out for the first time.

 

[kguillou]

Subjective memory but I also recall people's willingness to go out in public veering wildly from month to month back then. Like the difference between December 2020 and March 2021 felt huge.

Bingo. Christmas 2020, NOBODY was going anywhere. Most people didnt even see their families for the holidays because the pandemic was raging. Spring 2021, the vaccine was arriving and people were more willing to go out.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

I think some are overstating the potential backlash with Gal getting recast.

 

[Invader Joker]

Well we do, because Godzilla v Kong is a sequel to three other films. We know its audience, broadly:

Godzilla (2014) - $220m domestic, $324m international, $524m worldwide.
Kong: Skull Island - $168m domestic, $398m international, $566m worldwide.
Godzilla 2 - $110m domestic, $276m international, $386m worldwide.

Godzilla v Kong's actual numbers weren't far removed from those. It certainly would have grossed more, but there's nothing to indicate it would have grossed more than $700-800m in normal times.

That's the thing, you can speculate but you don't know that, especially because you're quite literally ignoring about a thousand different factors that were different in GvK's release compared to the other previous films.

I get why you'd have the instinct to just want to compare the numbers in such a blanket way but in the case of the pandemic you really can't do that. Numbers of infections kept fluctuating in different ways in different markets by the week, the entire way in which movies were typically marketed was disrupted in extreme capacities. There are genuinely about a billion factors that you're not accounting for when making these blanket comparisons that as much as you want to pretend are not relevant, they absolutely are. You wanna treat it as "Oh the pandemic was just an era where fewer people went to theaters I guess" but it's not as simple as that. There are a lot of nuances that came with the pandemic day by day, market by market and all of those add up.

If it was as simple as "This film flopped in the pandemic, therefore it'd have flopped in normal times as well", Gunn would probably not be CEO of DC Studios right now.

 

[TheScarecrow]

v


You're point is still flawed. Tenet was not released same day streaming. Croods was not released same day streaming. Not to mention how things were continuing to shut down even a month later.

GvK also had a whole vaccine that was rolling out for the first time.

Do you believe that in normal times WW1984 would have outgrossed WW17's $822m worldwide? I mean in the same circumstances, less the pandemic and HBO Max release. With the lack of impact of JL (which Gal essentially fronted the market for) and the huge criticisms that 1984 received?

I like Gal a LOT, and I even enjoyed 1984 as a flawed movie. Wonder Woman (2017) is, in my view, the perfect WW film. But Gal has so much stink on her now between BvS, JL and WW1984. I really don't think the general public thinks about her beyond fondly remembering the original Wonder Woman film. Certainly not enough to make her star in another huge hit movie.

If it was as simple as "This film flopped in the pandemic, therefore it'd have flopped in normal times as well", Gunn would probably not be CEO of DC Studios right now.

And if it was as simple as "every flop the DCEU has had since Aquaman is due solely to the pandemic and the HBO release schedule", then Walter Hamada would be head of DC films.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

Do you believe that in normal times WW1984 would have outgrossed WW17's $822m worldwide? I mean in the same circumstances, less the pandemic and HBO Max release. With the lack of impact of JL (which Gal essentially fronted the market for) and the huge criticisms that 1984 received?

I like Gal a LOT, and I even enjoyed 1984 as a flawed movie. Wonder Woman (2017) is, in my view, the perfect WW film. But Gal has so much stink on her now between BvS, JL and WW1984. I really don't think the general public thinks about her beyond fondly remembering the original Wonder Woman film. Certainly not enough to make her star in another huge hit movie.



And if it was as simple as "every flop the DCEU has had since Aquaman is due solely to the pandemic and the HBO release schedule", then Walter Hamada would be head of DC films.

If Gal had stink from BVS then why was Wonder Woman a hit in the first place? Or Aquaman? JL I would say is totally irrelevant because it came and went and was instantly forgotten by anyone who didn't then endure 746 years of internet flamewars about it.

 

[Invader Joker]

And if it was as simple as "every flop the DCEU has had since Aquaman is due solely to the pandemic and the HBO release schedule", then Walter Hamada would be head of DC films.

Even in that case, he probably wouldn't, because he remarkably had an entire different perspective on how to run the studio than what Zaslav wanted, and there was good reason to doubt that his future plans on how to reboot the DCEU were a good idea.

 

[TheScarecrow]

If Gal had stink from BVS then why was Wonder Woman a hit in the first place? Or Aquaman? JL I would say is totally irrelevant because it came and went and was instantly forgotten by anyone who didn't then endure 746 years of internet flamewars about it.

Because she was the only good thing about BvS and Wonder Woman was critically acclaimed.

Another thing to explain away - if there's this huge fanbase for Gal's Wonder Woman in the general public, where was the backlash when it as already announced by the trades and Patty Jenkins herself that Wonder Woman 3 was not moving ahead in any form?

The movie is already cancelled, there was no backlash.

 

[flickchick85]

For the record, while I disagree with TheScarecrow’s assessment of the numbers on WW84, I DO agree with the general point that while Gal was well-liked in the role, it’s not really an “audiences will be outraged” situation if they recast. She’s certainly been more positively received than Cavill and Affleck, but she’s not RDJ to WW’s Tony Stark. The love isn’t to the “she can’t be replaced” degree, imo.

 

[Invader Joker]

For the record, while I disagree with TheScarecrow’s assessment of the numbers on WW84, I DO agree with the general point that while Gal was well-liked in the role, it’s not really an “audiences will be outraged” situation if they recast. She’s certainly been more positively received than Cavill and Affleck, but she’s not RDJ to WW’s Tony Stark. The love isn’t to the “she can’t be replaced” degree, imo.

Yeah I think she's perfectly replaceable, it won't be hard to find another actress that embodies the role and becomes as iconic, or more iconic, than her.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

For the record, while I disagree with TheScarecrow’s assessment of the numbers on WW84, I DO agree with the general point that while Gal was well-liked in the role, it’s not really an “audiences will be outraged” situation if they recast. She’s certainly been more positively received than Cavill and Affleck, but she’s not RDJ to WW’s Tony Stark. The love isn’t to the “she can’t be replaced” degree, imo.

Oh of course she isn't, no one currently playing a DC character is in that ballpark no matter how great they may be.

 

[TheScarecrow]

Well my broader point was that pandemic or not, the DCEU has been dead in the water at the box office since 2018, while non-DCEU films have been big successes.

My point re: WW1984 and The Suicide Squad was that even in the context of the pandemic, they were comparatively weak compared to their peers and didn't indicate any sort of firm GA attachment to Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn or Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman.

Momoa is the bigger wildcard because he was more successful as Aquaman and played a character very different from the one in the comic books. An actor can play a GA acceptable Wonder Woman or Harley Quinn without upsetting the GA because Gadot and Robbie are comic accurate. Without Momoa, do they risk upsetting the audience by doing a comic accurate Aquaman or do they hire someone to impersonate Momoa.

 

[SwordOfMorning]

I'm not some die hard Momoa Aquaman fan and even I have trouble imagining being interested in a version of the character who isn't him at this point.

 

[kguillou]

People will certainly get over it, sure, but I guess my main point is…DC needs good press because for the last 6 months since Zaslav took over its been nothing but negative from Batgirl getting cancelled, to Cavill getting fired and projects getting cancelled left and right…firing one of their most liked stars is yet another heap on dirt onto a growing mound. Keeping Gal or at least giving her a proper send off at least engenders some goodwill and press.