Way back in the heady days of 2013, then-Warner Brothers, a movie production studio that also owns DC Comics and the right to most of its characters, took a look at the billions that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was raking in and said, “We want that.” However, the difference is that Marvel Studios had elevated aspiring producer Kevin Feige, who had made his bones in movies like You’ve Got Mail, before his work on X-Men and Spider-Man got him the attention of Marvel Studios. His vision was to create a shared universe of connected films to mirror the work that Marvel creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done to create the Avengers.
Even without a similar executive at DC, the launch of the DC Extended Universe of films started strong, with Superman and Batman franchise films like Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. But the films failed to cohere into an overarching story compelling enough to draw audiences into watching films about less-popular characters on the strength of the DC brand.
Two years after James Gunn’s offbeat Guardians of the Galaxy surprised everyone by becoming a major hit, DC attempted to replicate that success with David Ayers’ The Suicide Squad. Whereas Guardians had been upbeat and funny, Suicide Squad was so dark that the studio stepped in with reshoots and edits to lighten the tone. The result was a mess that pleased nobody. Gunn would eventually be brought in to reboot the film, and the corresponding Peacemaker HBO Max spinoff series.
The last DCEU film to qualify as a commercial and critical success was the 2017 Patty Jenkins outing Wonder Woman. Now, with Zack Snyder alienated from the Warner Brothers Discovery brain trust, and one-off films like The Batman and Joker finding the kind of runaway success that WBD had been hoping for, one fan on the popular Internet message board Reddit posits that the DCEU — at least as a counterpart to the MCU — does not exist, and never has.
Fellow fans couldn’t help agreeing:
In any case, while the recent spate of films from DC have been disappointing or in the case of Batgirl, just straight cancelled, watching the slow disintegration of Warner Bros. Discovery has continued to prove entertaining.