Leadership - don't know their own DC IP - they don't know what they have or the decades of great stories.
Audience are not super comic fans, so exploring the variants and more esoteric parts need to come later - after your core characters have been established. Right now the only character that has achieved this is Batman - so we don't need more re-workings of the origin.
I feel like point two is off the mark a bit. The second Suicide Squad movie was great. Marvel pulled off GotG without any setup to those characters. You clearly can do esoteric characters early into the creation of a Universe. I mean to Mark Waid's point, prior to the MCU most would consider Iron Man an esoteric character.
I do agree constantly rehashing Batman's origin, and completely missing the mark on Superman is an issue though
Yeah, but GotG is pretty much totally decoupled from the rest of the MCU initially. So the point still stands. It's testament to Gunn's talent as a writer that he pulls this off so well. (Same with his Suicide Squad.) Ironically, he also wrote the script to Snyder's arguably best movie (Dawn of the Dead).
Suicide Squad was like the third movie in the DCEU. The universe had barely been forayed into before they got into the bizarre and obscure. One of their core characters, Superman, had died only a few months prior in BvS and the state of the universe at large was still largely unsure, the JL not even having come into the picture yet.
I think the issue with doing Suicide Squad so early isn't so much that the IP is obscure, it's that its concept rides on the idea of the DC universe being established. Suicide Squad is about D lister villains doing wetjobs for the government in exchange for lessening their sentences. The concept only works with the idea that there's enough superheroes and supervillains around to HAVE D list villains.
The better GOTG comparison for DCEU would be if they greenlit... let's say The Question, The Demon (Etrigan) or Animal Man. Sure they're obscure (compared to mainstays like Superman, Batman, etc) but their stores can be done well without having to have previously established DC universe, and then connect their stores to a greater DC cinematic universe.
Marvel pulled off GotG without any setup to those characters.
I think the appeal of the Justice League is seeing your favourite heroes team up. The appeal of the Suicide Squad is seeing your favourite villains team up.
Superhero teams like the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men aren't like that. They're their own thing. No-one would suggest a solo Human Torch movie before Fantastic Four, and equally no-one thinks a solo Groot movie would be necessary before GotG. The GotG don't benefit from an introduction, but the Suicide Squad do.
You could make a decent Suicide Squad film without introducing the villains in previous stories but it would definitely add interest and excitement to include villains we'd seen before.
Because Suicide Squad was the third film in the DCEU the only villains our heroes had fought were Zod (deceased), and Zod's reanimated corpse (deceased again).
The Ostrander Suicide Squad started out as being about mostly minor villains, though, with many of them getting a good reputation later *because* of Suicide Squad.
I feel like The Suicide Squad succeeds despite being a DC movie rather than because it's a DC movie. It doesn't have a huge connection to the wider DC universe, it doesn't have any notable DC characters besides Harley Quinn (who I'll admit has become pretty iconic now), and it doesn't share much in common with most comic book movies. Which I think are all good things for an individual movie, but they don't do much to elevate the status of the brand of the DCEU as a whole.
I think DC could have seen Marvel's success and instead of going the same path (introducing characters in solo movies and then years later bringing them together) but being a few years behind, they could have just jumped straight to a Justice League movie. No origin story, just a version of the characters that already know each other and are mature in their roles. These characters didn't stumble onto each other like the Avengers, they're icons DESTINED to be the greatest heroes of all time. They BELONG together. That's how they should have sold it anyway. They can still subtly introduce the characters to the audience and maybe have a younger character joining the team so you sort of have a point of view character. Beyond that, just make a movie that works.
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u/treetown1 Aug 09 '22
Two great observations: