Bizarro World (Superhero Movies)

Marvel vs. DC. I love comic books movies and I love the tug-of-war between Marvel and DC comics that has been going on since live-action comic book movies have gone mainstream. Marvel has a number of successful franchises, including the X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Avengers (wherein each Avengers has a franchise of his own). DC, thanks to the brilliant Christopher Nolan, is being held up pretty much by the Dark Knight Trilogy alone.

Marvel knew five or six years ago that they were going to attempt an Avengers movie. Franchise crossovers don't happen very often, but when they do, we get things like Freddy vs. Jason and AvP: Alien vs. Predator. But a staple of comic books is character/storyline intersections, and it was only a matter of time before the film adaptations attempted this. DC, on the other hand, only recently decided that in order to compete they would have to do something similar; this idea has led to the Justice League movie slated for 2015. However, instead of having standalone movies for each member of team - as Marvel did preceding the Avengers - they intend to make up time by going straight for the Justice League.

At least that was the plan. The latest news is that Joseph Gordon Levitt from the Dark Knight Trilogy and Henry Cavill's superman from next year's Man of Steel will fill the Batman and Superman roles in the JL movie. My first reaction was that this seems like a complete cop-out by DC. The Dark Knight Trilogy is a unique Batman story and was not intended to tie in with the rest of the DC universe. So it seems that they are going to try to ride the success of Nolan's Batman right into a Justice League movie.

However, having given it some thought, I think this is a pretty good idea. Marvel had to repeat to us again and again that the four Avenger characters all live in the same universe (mainly by having them acknowledge each other and occasionally sit down with Phil Coulson). If the film stage of the DC universe is going to be in any way unique, I think it would be wise to have each member of the Justice League stay in his own universe. This has two benefits: 1) we will never expect to see the Justice League in any individual movie. The challenge facing every Avengers movie from here on out is giving us reasons why the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. don't face the problems of each individual hero. This problem would be even greater in the DC universe, where there is virtually no challenge Batman could spend a whole movie dealing with that Superman couldn't handle in a few minutes. By keeping all of the characters blatantly, almost ignorantly separate, in their individual franchises, there is much more freedom for the writers. 2) This makes more sense as far as how DC comics are. Most Marvel heroes are assumed to exist in the same world, with some exceptions. But in the DC universe, there are plenty of worlds, dimensions, alternate realities; all things that would make it more sensible to avoid overlap outside of the Justice League movies.

Hopefully this is their plan. In addition, the villain in JL will be Darkseid, who is the Marvel counterpart to Thanos, the villain in the Avengers 2. And since both movies are set for the summer of 2015, it will be very interesting to see what each studio comes up with.