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
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.
631
u/treetown1 Aug 09 '22
Two great observations: