‘Justice League’ won’t happen if ‘Man Of Steel’ flops

DC Comics

Oh, DC. You really can’t catch a break. I throw a lot of shade at DC Comics for their apparent inability to get anything right. But, you know, they kind of deserve it. In 2011 they rebooted their entire comics line to start from scratch for new readers then proceeded to hire horrid 90s dinosaurs like Rob Liefeld to produce the books, automatically alienating anybody they hoped to attract. Their movie efforts have been no better – for every Dark Knight Rises, there’s a Green Lantern. And for every Green Lantern, there’s a dozen projects that don’t even make it – news just dropped that the CW isn’t moving forward with the pilot for their proposed Wonder Woman TV show, Amazon. And now there’s some rough news on the slate for the much-buzzed about Justice League movie.

In an Variety article about Warner Motion Pictures president Jeff Robinov, there’s a little nugget that lets us know that if Zack Snyder’s upcoming Man Of Steel doesn’t make big money, Justice League might be dead in the water. This is amazing, but not surprising, and it might actually be for the best. Read on.

The biggest complaint that people have leveled against the DC universe in both movies and comics is that things are just too damned complicated. The Superboy of Smallville isn’t the same Superman as Man of Steel, the Wonder Woman of Amazon probably wouldn’t be the same one that would be in the Justice League movie, there’s like five different human Green Lanterns in the comics now, there’s alternate universes and all this garbage that makes it impossible to establish what the Marvel properties did: continuity.

All of the Disney Marvel movies fit together. Not in any big ways, but they don’t actively contradict each other. DC on the other hand – we’ve had the four 90s Batman movies with three different actors, then the Nolan trilogy that threw out everything that came before, and now they’re talking that the Batman in Justice League will be another reboot of the character. Superman’s had the same treatment. Marvel spent four years between Iron Man and Avengers. Obviously Warner Brothers doesn’t want to do the hard work of laying down a foundation, but we’ll see if it works out for them.