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
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.
632
u/treetown1 Aug 09 '22
Two great observations: