Can supervillains save DC’s EU?
DC’s Extended Universe made headlines by becoming the first superhero mega-saga to debut a female-led episode, with the hugely successful ‘Wonder Woman’. So why not steal a march on Marvel once again by creating the first ever live-action supervillain fli
The last three movies in the MCU have all boasted well-drawn antagonists with complex and believable motives.
Before Josh Brolin’s Thanos made such an impressive impact in this year’s Avengers: Infinity War, it used to be said that villains were the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Achilles heel.
Apart from Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and (in flashes) Cate Blanchett’s Hela, the bad guys of the MCU always seemed more thinly written than their valorous counterparts. Even Ultron, the ever-duplicating great robot big bad of the second Avengers movie, was never much more than a annoying digital thorn in the side of Earth’s mightiest heroes, while the less said about Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith or Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash the better.
It seems to have been criticism that Marvel has taken on the chin. The last three movies in the MCU have all boasted welldrawn antagonists with complex and believable motives, from the neoMalthusian philosophy of Thanos, to the misguided proletarianism of Michael Keaton’s Vulture in SpiderMan: Homecoming ,to the twisted Afrocentrism of Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger in Black Panther. It might come as some surprise, then, with Marvel having upped its bad-guy game, that it is Warner Bros’ rival DCEU mega-saga that looks to be rebuilding its shared movie universe around supervillains.
Variety reported recently that Jared Leto, whose performance as the Joker in the ill-faring Suicide Squad was left mostly on the cutting room floor, is to be treated to his very own movie by Warner.
By the time that film reaches cinemas, we will probably have seen a completely different actor, Joaquin Phoenix, playing the same role in his own Joker solo outing. Might these two Jokers eventually meet and battle it out for the right to claim the mantle of true clown prince of Gotham? Sadly not (though this, surely, should be a chuckle-worthy plot strand of The Lego Batman Movie 2), for despite both of them being Warner creations, the pair are somehow destined never to find themselves within the same plane of movie-world existence.
Leto-Joker will be the cackling green-haired sociopath of the interconnected DCEU, while Phoenix-Joker is trapped in his own standalone origins story.
The main reason for the latter project’s existence seems to be to allow Warner to riff heavily off Martin Scorsese crime movies of the 1970s and 80s, while presumably pinching the more palatable elements of Alan Moore’s controversial novel The Killing Joke.
The focus on villains is hardly a new concept for the DCEU. Warner chose to put the Dirty Dozenstyle bad-guys-on-a-mission romp Suicide Squad into multiplexes before we had even seen more than the odd cameo by DC staples such as Wonder Woman or The Flash on the big screen.
And there was a strong hint that we are due to see yet another supervillain teamup in the end credits scene for Justice League, with Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor asking Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke whether they shouldn’t form “a league of our own” to counter Batman and Superman’s.
Comic-book aficionados will remember that Slade Wilson was a founder member of
Luthor’s Secret Society of Super Villains in the Infinite Crisis storyline.
It is probably safe to say that DC does have better — certainly better-known — bad guys than Marvel. And it is easy to see why Warner might have spotted a way to make itself stand out from its rival. The DCEU made headlines by becoming the first superhero mega-saga to debut a female-led episode, with the hugely successful Wonder Woman. So why not steal a march on Marvel once again by creating the first ever live-action supervillain flick?
There have, after all, been plenty of similarly themed entries in animation, from the Incredible Me movies to Megamind. Clearly, Warner is banking on using bad guys to help the DC universe come good.