The Number One Reason the DCEU Is Not Failing

Ever since Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (BVS: DoJ) released in theaters to jump-start the future films of the DCEU, fans on both sides of the comic book divide have been going back and forth about whether the DC Comics' recent post-Dark Knight Trilogy films are good or bad. Yes, Man of Steel came out first and technically began the franchise known today as the DCEU, but the whole "controversy" of fans vs critics began with Batman vs Superman.

Throughout this article, references to Rotten Tomatoes will be made. It's not because they are an all-encompassing perspective on why a movie is good, bad, or somewhere in between. Far from it, but like a research paper for school and Wikipedia, it's a good starting point for the researching phase. That being said, this article will not attempt to explain why the DCEU is failing. Spoiler alert: They're 1/5 on "good" films. You can't argue with the numbers. Their most successful film, according to Rotten Tomatoes critic's score, is Wonder Woman. Their poorest ranked film, according to the same source, is Suicide Squad with 26 percent rotten. As a point of reference, BvS: DoJ is at twenty-seven. That's only a one percent difference.

Why was the next movie after Suicide Squad a box office smash? There are plenty of stories of behind the scenes shuffles of producers over the past few years, people losing their jobs and others getting promoted. While most behind-the-scene changes take a while to appear on screen, Wonder Woman was the start of the Geoff Johns as pseudo-Kevin Feige of the DCEU. It could've also been a female director, Patty Jenkins, who brought a different set of sensibilities to DC's cinematic universe. The world may never know, but the main reason the majority of these movies are failing is not because of what everyone says.

MCU vs. DCEU: Long Game vs. Short Game

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has taken the box office by storm with over ten billion dollars in revenue, it's a tour de force of comic book movies. They've gotten as popular as others like the short-lived Universal-Dark Monsters World and the constantly fluctuating in quality DCEU. As Uncle Ben's famous mantra says: "With great power comes great responsibility." Because the MCU is such a beast of both storytelling and business model, people who watch the DC cinematic films, more often than not, say the reason they're failing is because they aren't taking their time introducing these characters. While that may be true, saying it's the reason they're failing is a fallacy.

Let's travel back in time to 2008 and the release of Iron Man. Nobody seeing that movie for the first time knew the Avengers or the larger MCU would be a thing. It wasn't until the months leading up the first Avengers film that people began to realize the scope of Marvel Studios' ambitions.

As any historian will tell you, hindsight bias is a danger of studying history. If people knew then what they knew now, things would've been different. The classic and controversial example is slavery vs state's rights being the cause of the American Civil War. The former is true, but the "state's rights" angle was introduced after the war ended. We can apply this same logic to the DCEU.

There are as many possibilities of why a story works or doesn't as there are people in the universe. If the DC cinematic universe did follow the Marvel "formula," people would've complained about them being a carbon copy of the MCU. To avoid this comparison, the producers and studio execs decided to go the opposite route and condense character introductions to one or two films. There was simply no way for them to escape the shadow of Marvel Studios.

Granted, their pre-Wonder Woman era films—including Justice League, as that was conceived around the same time as Batman v Superman, but due to unfortunate circumstances was a mess of conflicting visions for how the movie should look and feel—were bad. In the end, it was a coin flip as to whether or not Justice League would flop. Fans loved it. Critics hated it. The fact remains, the DCEU has seen better days; but saying the reason for their failure is because they aren't "taking their time" like Marvel is just wrong.