The Screen DC Universe Reboots: What Can We Expect?

The superhero movie genre has been booming from the very start of this century, with the entire period seeing the major studios barraging audiences with A-grade, big-budget blockbusters about the biggest household name characters from the pages of Marvel and DC Comics--accompanied by a smaller but still significant traffic on the small screen (in the age of streaming, increasingly an extension of the big-screen stuff, such that you had to watch Wandavision to fully appreciate Dr. Strange 2).

Unsurprisingly, after being so heavily exploited for so long, the genre is not looking its best.

Consider where things now stand. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has gone from looking unstoppable in Phase Three to underwhelming in Phase Four; and the DC Extended Universe a letdown again and again, such that Warner Bros. Discovery is officially giving up on the old vision (all as it likewise seems to be giving up on the small-screen Arrowverse). Amid all that lovers of superhero film and television desirous of more would seem to have had as their best hope for something fresh and interesting the reports of James Gunn and Peter Safran's work on some grand reboot of the DC Universe for after 2023 (at least, excluding the decision to make a sequel to The Batman, due out in 2025).

This month they have revealed part of what audiences can expect, including:

* A TV show all about Waller (the character Viola Davis first played in 2016's Suicide Squad), inventively named "Waller."

* A Green Lantern show "in the vein of True Detective."

* A Game of Thrones-style show (blood-soaked soap opera?) set on Wonder Woman's home island of Themyscira.

* A "much more hard-core" Supergirl pointedly produced by a horrific childhood spent getting to Earth.

* An "impostor syndrome"-themed show about Booster Gold.

* A Batman film (not starring Robert Pattinson) utilizing the content of The Brave and the Bold, complete with Damian Wayne in a "very strange father-and-son story."

That's not all of it, but I think you get the picture.

The entertainment press, of course, is responding with its usual enthusiasm.

I will admit to not sharing the feeling. Admittedly I have been losing enthusiasm for the genre for rather a long time--the genre seeming to me to keep going mainly on the form's convenient fit with the studios' particular marketing requirements rather than its having anything fresh and new to offer (and depending overmuch on such superficial tweaks as the "edginess" of Deadpool, etc. for any appearance of newness). But there is also something else evident in the pattern that has me not looking forward to any of these--namely that (as we ought to have expected from the writer who decided "Let's make Scrappy Doo the villain!" in a textbook example of the principle that the Teen Titans Go! episode "The Return of Slade" had to teach, and which the absolutely unteachable folks in Hollywood seem absolutely incapable of learning), he is going all-in on "dark" and "edgy" and frankly pretentious. (A Green Lantern show "in the vein of True Detective?" Really?) Irksome enough in itself to those of us who think big dumb action movies should actually be fun it is the more annoying because rather than some dramatic shift-of-course in that respect, at least, it actually sounds like just-more-of-the-same stuff that I, for one, didn't particularly care for in the first place.