f13.net

Is coming (http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/20/showbiz/comic-con-superman-batman/index.html?sr=sharebar_facebook).

- Zack Snyder directs
- Henry Cavill
- Haven't cast Batman
- They read one of the seminal quotes from The Dark Knight Returns, to set the vibe of the movie

I'm conflicted whether I want Bale for Batman in this. On the one hand, a new Batman kinda requires the movie spend a chunk of wasteful time establishing the actor as Wayne and Batman. But on the other, I don't feel Bale can convey a cynical enough old guy if they're doing Dark Knight Returns like conflict. I'd almost want a 1980s-era Clint Eastwood for that  :grin:

On the Superman side though, that seems perfect.

I don't want to see Bale in this, I want to Dark Knight Trilogy to remain complete and brilliant, and completely untarnished by the stupidity that is superman.

This sort of stuff gets too much into comic book wankery which has no appeal to me at all.

Bale said he ain't doing it tho.

ugh

I don't think the Nolan Batman would fit into the new Superman world.  I mean he got his ass beat by Bane who was just a normal muscle bound dude.  What's he gonna do against anyone with superpowers.  He's never made to out to be super smart like Batman is in the comics, they pretty much had Luscious Fox give him most of the tech he used in the movies.  Although he was able to modify some of the stuff, the base for everything was already laid out for him.

Why yes, he really is  :grin:

Hah doh!   :awesome_for_real:

Batman & Robin for the Avengers generation.

They really can't do it as pure Miller--that only works if you've got characters with tons of history with each other. Skipping ahead to the future of Man of Steel and making the Cavill Superman a flunky for the US government doesn't have any bite or wit to it. I'm guessing they're going to go with "Batman needs to take down Superman for some good reason, once he's taken down they team up against a common enemy [likely Luthor]" where all they're going to rip off from Miller is the way that the battle in DKR goes down.

Spoiler: The movie is bad.


What Khaldun said. There's no way this can be at all related to the DKR. Batman and Superman fight due to a contrived misunderstanding, then put aside their differences to beat Lex Luthor's giant robot or some shit.

The vibe of the movie is going to be the same as in all of Snyder's other movies.

This is going to be terrible and cost a fortune.  Right now I'd put it at a toss-up between this and Guardians as the movies that burst the superhero bubble.

This could be true, but its going to make a bajillion (that's right, I said bajillion with a J) dollars.

I'm actually kinda psyched about Guardians of the Galaxy.  They have a pretty good cast, plus I have more faith in Marvel when it comes to movies then I do DC.

Given F13's amazing ability to be entirely wrong about movies I'm expecting this to be the best movie of the year.  :awesome_for_real:

Okay, but here is a question nobody on the intertubes has ever thought of before:  Who would actually win in a fight between Batman and Superman?  I say Supes would win, because just one grazing punch would turn Batman into blood pudding.

The whole idea of this is retarded.

 :uhrr:

Obviously Batman is going to find out how to recreate Kryptonite air and use it to defeat Supes.

Not sure if Serious.

Both serious and not serious at the same time, I guess.  The whole idea is silly.  I have never taken part of a Batman vs. Superman debate, because it is pants on head territory.  As is the idea for this movie.


Yeah, see, that's the whole problem right there.  Because that is his only chance.  Coincidentally, it would also be my only chance against Superman as well.  Might as well make a movie about me fighting Superman.

I'd watch that.

"SEE THE SON OF KRYPTON PUNCHING THE HEADS OFF MEMBERS OF F13 ONE AT A TIME!"

Fucking Be There.

I was more thinking he could melt my face off with his laser vision, but I like the way you think.

As to your actual point :  Yeah, pretty much the problem I've always had with Supes is it's Kryptonite or nuthin'.

Though in Red Son, the lamps trick by Soviet Bat was rather cool.

Exactly.  Minus the kryptonite, there isn't really much you can do.  He could literally beat Batman by just standing there and letting Bats punch him all day.

It isn't nearly as difficult as you make out. Superman's real weakness is that he isn't very smart.

You just give them a conflicting goal that doesn't involve punching each other.

Find the widget before the other guy.
Save the redhead vs save the blonde whoops they are mutually exclusive because.
Publish and be damned vs prevent a riot.
Rob from the rich vs don't rob from the rich.

Clearly they have to work together in act 3 anyway.

This film will still be terrible. It has superman in it for one thing.

Well, he was.  Evidently the new story is, "Oh all People from Krypton are geniuses (in the same way you're a genius to someone from 12bc) and the yellow sun power has made him able to think faster than anyone!"

Much like super-speed to rival the flash (rather than 'faster than a speeding bullet) and his ridiculous power creep in the 40's some writers thought would be a good idea to heap on him for whatever storyline they wanted to sell to the comics crowd in the 70's.  Oh he's also got an eidetic memory now.

Go back to the 30's and he's a mook who acts without thinking and relies on his strength to carry-through.

Never mind the 30s, I once again submit Lois and Clark as the benchmark for all things Superman.

I wish you'd stop it.

 :awesome_for_real:

Maybe, but then that isn't really Superman VERSUS Batman.  That's more like Supes and Bats sit down for a spirited game of Parcheesi, or Chutes and Ladders.  You can't put "versus" in there unless there is some kind of fight happening.  In which case Superman could just send his blazing fast fist of steel back in time to punch Batman's mom in the uterus.

I can't believe I am doing this.

And yet every time they've clashed in the comics, he's beaten the everliving fuck out of the alien.  And it's always been funny.

The laws of narrative causality tell us Batman has to win every time. Invincible alien punching the batman is even less interesting than kryptonite. And superman outwitting batman given his physical superiority just seems unfair.

And of course the competition between these can be more interesting than a straight smack down. I concede it won't be. But there is no reason it can't be.

I remember in one of the Saturday cartoons (I forget now if it was the Batman cartoon or the Superman cartoon) there was a "Superman vs Batman" episode where it's established that Superman thinks Batman is a criminal vigilante and wants to arrest him, but Batman blackmails Superman into not messing with him by telling him that he's rigged a gadget on himself that will detonate a bomb and kill an innocent person if Supes touches him or otherwise incapacitates him.  If Superman helps him catch the villain of the week, he'll remove the bomb.  Superman verifies the truth of all this with his super polygraph powers, and agrees to be Batman's sidekick for the remainder of the episode.

At the end of the episode, Batman of course reveals that the innocent person was himself.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm imagining that Supes is screaming out, "HARDCORE PVP!" with every punch.

I'd claim that Zod made me do it. Your avatar gives me plausible deniability Ironwood.

Kryptonite isn't Superman's only weakness. He's always been vulnerable to magic.

(http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/11111/111113714/3122142-supermanheman.jpg)

Though Batman getting some magic trinkets to beat Superman with is, of course, a silly idea for this very serious topic.

Well yes, Batman getting a magic trinket is much sillier than Skeletor magically controlling Superman to attack He-Man.

Wait, He-Man can beat Superman ?

How does that work ?  Eternian Sun not Yellow enough ?

I shouldn't be, but I am baffled by the fact that those two universes have ever even been put together.  Superman vs He-man?  WTF?  It doesn't even look right.

Comics are strange.

I thought He-Man Was Marvel, but there you go.

Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about whether it was all DC or not.  They just don't fit together in any way.

While we're at it, though, were I magically controllilng Superman I would just have him fly into Castle Grayskull at supersonic speeds and blow it to smithereens.  Instant win!

For better or worse, there's actually a DC/He-Man 6 issue crossover mini-series starting next month.

Edit:


For the record, Superman has also met or fought:


Aliens and Predators
Terminators
Muhammad Ali and various other real world people like Orson Welles, Jerry Lewis, Ann Blyth, Antonino Rocca, Ralph Edwards, Perry Como, JFK, and Pat Boone.
The Thundercats
I Love Lucy (George Reeves appearing as Superman on the show)
The KKK
Bugs Bunny
The Quik Bunny (mascot for Quik chocolate milk)

Except Skeletor wanted to control Greyskull, not destroy it.  The place turned a foppish Prince Valiant into the mightiest man in the universe, imagine what it would do for a faceless necromancer.

As for ridiculous crossovers, here's a few that are just weird

http://www.cracked.com/article_18785_6-comic-book-crossovers-you-wont-believe-actually-happened.html

Surprised there hasn't been a Superman vs Judge Dredd crossover yet.

Ahahahah, I wonder if this decision was made after the critical panning of Man of Steel.

Seriously; I don't think it is possible to make a really good serious Superman movie. Don't say the 70s ones either; those are camp.

Well, the quest for peace was quite....

Nope, couldn't manage it.

Batman VS. Predator would be a far more interesting movie.



 :why_so_serious:

Only way this could be of any value is if Batman is going punish Superman for the events of the first movie.

I don't get how this can work, honestly.  You're going to introduce a new Batman and give him sufficient power levels to go head to head with Superman?  If you introduce Batman at those power levels, how can he go on to fight the Joker, Penguin, etc... without it being a joke?  Batman is the human side of the DC universe, and you're destroying that humanity right from the start?  They could surprise me and make this work, but I just don't see it.

Nearly everything in Eternia is magical. Ramming Superman into Castle Greyskull would likey give supes a crushed noggin.

He-Man's strength comes from a magical source, Castle Greyskull. Superman is vulnerable to magic, so yea. If He-Man punched Superman, he'd hurt him.

Because there's no conflict.  He's so grossly overpowered that the only source of conflict that can be used is the Hero's Choice. While camp, the 1st Superman showed that even THAT isn't really a problem for Mr. "I can travel through time."

He's a god. Gods are boring unless they're fighting other gods and we have no concern for their squabbles these days.

Yep same reason Supes has problems fighting Captain Marvel.

Don't forget his Repair The Great Wall Of China vision! That's one specific superpower! I bet he was so happy to finally get to use it.

I am very much not a comic-book expert. However, I will say with authority you really need to go read The Dark Knight Returns (http://www.amazon.com/Batman-The-Dark-Knight-Returns/dp/1563893428). It actually works.

However, I agree with the others here: this wouldn't be a good premise for a Superman/Batman crossover summer blockbuster movie. You'd need 2-3 movies to establish how much Superman got corrupted and how cynical Batman got along with the pissing matches between them that happen before the final encounter in Crime Alley. And even that fight was Batman getting his ass kicked until the trump card at the end. And even that wasn't what it was all about in the first place.

Too convoluted for the ooo-shiny crowd.

And I agree Bale wouldn't fit this kind of movie. Which is actually the thing I'm more curious about. They can slap together any ol' story and it'd be fine. But they get the wrong Bruce Wayne/Batman or don't establish him well enough, and it probabky doesn't work well.

It's a strange direction to go.  What does this mean for the JLA movie?  IS there one?  Lex will probably trick Supes into trying to capture Batman and after hijinks, they team up and take Lex's new real estate plan down.

I get the superman is weak against magical sources. I get that he-man's strength comes from magic but....what exactly about a punch is magical? Is superman reall so lame he has DR 100/magic and he-man's fists count as +1?

Silly people using comic book logic.

The superman brand needs to team up with the batman franchise to make money. The content of the movie will just involve someone hitting someone, doesn't really matter who.

Though this conversation is a good example of why Superman is such a boring character and it was so easy to skip the movie.

I didn't know about the Magic (not caring at all about Superman) and I was applying this logic to it.  I feel enlightened now.

Kinda.

I think the above is right--you'll get a Batman emerging in Gotham City, we'll see a quick sketch of what he's up to via the news reports which will be full of hysteria and fear, Lex Luthor will beg Superman to capture this sinister vigilante, Batman will prepare some kind of Superman defense (probably some kind of recreation of Krypton's atmosphere as per Man of Steel) while trying to convince Superman that Lex Luthor is the real bad guy here and he's up to something that could threaten the world etc., they'll team up after a bit more superhero-misunderstanding silliness and go after Luthor, who will have something going that needs both of them to defeat it. (Something for Supes to fight plus some sort of fortress or facility that Batman has to get into.)  I really doubt they're going to throw us anything surprising or artful here.

I have read it.  And seen the animated adaption (about a week ago).  I think we both nailed why this wouldn't work in this movie: TDKR relies upon the established characters.  It is only because we know who and what the Batman is (and in the case of TDKR, was) that we can accept his plan.

And, 1/2 the story has already been told in the recent Batman trilogy, anyways.  Batman coming out of retirement?  III.  Joker's gambit?  II.  Heck, the best argument to have Bale come back for this movie would be to complete the entire DKR storyline with the established characters.

I believe you can make a good Superman movie.  I don't believe they nailed the forumla, yet, but I did see some things I liked in this most recent version.  I just don't see how they'll improve the situation by introducing Batman in such an 'unBatman-like' situation.  I believe DC is so buried in trappings that take time to accept, they'd be much better off introducing the DC world slowly before doing any cross-overs. 

I'd agree that Bayle's Batman was almost there, but he's out of the game too young.  There's no way you can establish a history between him and Supes having happened to give it enough of a men-at-odds feeling.

You use the first act to set up their teamwork.

The movie opens on a toy factory.  Bats is investigating and he overcomes deadly traps and confronts the Toymaker.  Toy jumps in a big robot and laughs.  Bats is overpowered.  Suddenly Supes blows in and takes out the robot and they both capture Toymaker.  Supes has heard of Bats and takes him to the FoS where Bats studies Superman carefully.  Meanwhile LL, who was bankrolling Toymaker, is disturbed by the team up.  His plan to control Metropolis and Gotham City is at risk.  He invites the press (Clark and Lois) to tour his new factory to fight other superpowered invaders like the Kryptonians.  Lots of tension.  Lex notes how strongly Lois defends Supes.  Her glowing stories in the DP make him realize that she may be a friend or even lover to Supes.  He puts her in a dangerous position and Supes promptly shows and LL watches the sexual tension.

Bats, meanwhile, is disturbed by Lexcorp moving in on Gotham City after Wayne Industries recent issues.  He fights goons and goes up the food chain by detective work.  His home life is dull as we compare it to Supes and Lois' glamorous blossoming relationship.  'Robin' is anxious to measure up to the old Bats so he is going on a tear.  Finally LL  meets him and turns him against Supes.  Look what Supes did to save Lois!  He endangered a whole city for a single life, etc.  Lex brings up the horrible damage Metropolis suffered and the death of Zod.  A couple more staged incidents make Bats decide to help LL restrain Supes.

The big 'fight'.  Supes is no match for Bats and LL's brains.  Bats goes off satisified and LL tortures Supes and plans to do a cell transfer so LL can be like Supes.  Of course he'll kill Supes after the transfer, so he won't have an equal.  Bats, who never believed LL, saves Supes and they team up to bring down a powered up LL while Supes is still weak.

Supes and Bats bond and they decide that a team of heroes can do even more.  They hint that they'll create a league that will enforce justice. 

That's what I'd do.

We are getting into some dangerous fanfic territory here people.

Yeah.  Let's not do this.  Like at all.

I read this far, far dirtier than anything BUT a fanfic, so... yeah.

A movie where Batman is overpowered by "the Toymaker" does not sound like a winner to me.

Oh I think definitely worse.

Fine, but you're missing out on my pitch involving their adventures in Bat-bondage and Super-furry.   

Was the animated movie good enough to watch? I saw it come up on netflix at some point.

Otherwise: totally agree.

And on the fanfic: as much as I enjoy reading the ideas, all those roads lead to disappointment. It's fun, and yes, we all know this is about money and they're trying to catch up to Marvel without having nearly enough individual character successes to do it and whatnot. And I think many of us have wanted a Batman/Superman movie, and we all laughed with a bit of hope at the movie poster in NYC in I Am Legend.

But they need to pull off quite a bit, including a whole new Batman probably, so there's a lot of ways it can fail.

Actually the Dini-era animated Batman/Superman World's Finest is quite great and really would not be a terrible source material for a live action flick in that it has a Batman and a Superman who don't really know each other well, and it mixes the Joker and Lex Luthor as antagonists in some clever ways. It also has a twist that nobody had thought of until then but which makes a lot of sense--Bruce Wayne quite seriously romances Lois Lane (who is at that point quite diffident about Clark Kent and a bit wary even about Superman in romantic terms). About the only disadvantage to it as a template is that both characters have their individual status quo situations pretty well established, whereas this film is going to have to tell us what kind of Batman we're dealing with and do it fairly quickly.

I enjoyed the book more than the movie, but it was good for DC animation.  They were very faithful, including the trappings of the 80s.  If you don't love women's shoulder pads...

I think I'll survive.

It's been done. And very well too. Batman: Dead End (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhEcP86cGt8)

You can watch it and download it here. Batman: Dead end site (http://www.collorastudios.com/projects/bde/bdemain.htm)

The same bunch also did a mockup of a trailer for superman/ Batman crossover movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsmqc4RhSQY

I think we'd all like to see Superman team up with Burka Avenger (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pdbshf4iPE) to take on the Taliban  :drillf:

Earlier on in the comic Skelator swipes at Superman and cuts him, establishing that Eternian magic swords can hurt superman. Its also how Skelator gains control of Superman.

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Uhdt7UHnA3w/TBb2wUiwudI/AAAAAAAABFw/sFwuWMeh93c/s320/Superman+is+a+dick.jpg)

From this review of the comic if you are that curious. With more hot Super on Heman action.

http://www.needlessthingssite.com/2010/06/he-man-versus-superman-comic-book.html

There are different levels of preposterous, and the further you dig into those comics, the more preposterous things get.  It is already silly to talk about who would win between the movie level versions (the A level Canon).  It is even more ridiculous to take the comic book canon and do the same thing, though I can see why some people would have fun with it.  But then to look at something like the totally pants-on-head abomination of a Superman who somehow visits Eternia and fights Skeletor and He-Man...there is no sane reason to do this other than to make fun of it.  The whole idea is retarded beyond imagination.  Just because the same company might be behind them doesn't mean we have to become insane and actually pretend that they have anything to do with each other.  Might as well ask who would win in a fight between Mara Jade and a very angry Donald Duck.

Donald effing Duck, of course. 

No, no, no.  Mara would use Sith Mind tricks to control Judge Doom. Then Donald would be dead!

The real question is who would win if Mara Jade were in a tank and Donald Duck were in a mech.

Anger leads to hate and hate leads to the Dark Side. Who's got more anger than old-school Donald Duck? The powers of Judge Doom are nothing compared to a Category 5 Force Lightning Storm arising from Donald!

Look, if you're not going to be serious about this, then pipe down. 

Donald.

Fing.

Duck.

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pSrvGEsVSmU/UUFSbRmYbJI/AAAAAAAAELo/dUE8Sqn3AlI/s1600/Darkwing+Duck+photo.jpg)

Ok, technically not donald duck, but still...

Racist.

That's just not final art.

Dude.  Darkwing Duck is no Donald.  Fing.  Duck.

I pulled out the He-Man comic because it's fucking awesometerrible. If you want a more "canon" example, how about-

Dr. Fate
Zatana
Etrigan
Captain Marvel

or any other of the DC universe's magical superheroes and villains? I'd be fucking shocked if Batman didn't have a section of the Batcave packed with magic junk at this point.


This what all these discussions boil down to anyway. Just because Batman is a little more realistic than Optimus Prime, doesn't make Batman any more plausible.

At this point, I do believe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwBK31tC5QM is totally relivant to the topic at hand.

Sorry if it came across as an attack aimed at you personally, didn't mean it that way.  Here's what I do mean:  Batman versus Superman is a totally fair game, because they theoretically occupy the same logical universe.  The same cannot be said about He-Man and Superman.  They do not fit together in any sensible way, regardless of whatever ham-fisted story-telling is trying to be used to convince us otherwise.  The comic you brought out is indeed awesometerrible.

No sweat man.

I'm just trying to point out that Superman's vulerability to magic is a Thing, and it's been pretty consistent in the fiction. There's a whole swath of DC heroes (and villains) who could have a shot at Superman without using the green crutch. And in a versus scenario, it's not totally implausible for Batman to get ahold of some magic advantage to even the odds. Though it does bring in the magic aspect of the DC Universe, which would probably feel like a cop-out to moviegoers who aren't into the big morass of DC universe lore. "Batman borrowed a magic wand, WTF?"

Yeah, that's kinda how I look at it, too, to be honest.  If speculating what would happen in a MOVIE between these two, I think it best to stick to the movie canon.

... in which we have neither Magic or Kryptonite, yet.et.

I haven't seen any of the newer movies, so I am considering the orignal stuff from the 80s to be fair game too.  ALL movie canon.

Rumor is WB is offering ALL OF THE MONEY to Christian Bale (http://www.slashfilm.com/rumor-warner-bros-offers-christian-bale-60-million-to-play-batman-again/).

BAD WB. *grabs the water bottle*

Idiots.

And Hollywood wonders why they aren't making money back on movies.

My first reaction is how are they going to have a 'gimpy' Batman alongside Supes. 

Dude got destroyed by a normal human thug, Bane.  What's he gonna do if he gets punched by anyone with any kind of super strength?

He and Robin will be driving a Bat-Jaeger.   :drill:

Obviously Batman will see that what he needs to do is build a giant tank with a main gun that spews concrete filled with bits of Kryptonite all over the Fortress of Solitude, and will just bury Supes at the bottom of the Arctic ocean.

--Dave

That's a lot of concrete.

An overkill. Just need flecks of concrete.

Not at all surprised about Bale offer though. Like I said earlier, they'd need to spend a good chunk of the movie, or even a new Batman movie, establish a not-Bale Batman. I'm sure on paper, the  business-types think they can save themselves much headaches this way.

If they want to keep continuity, they use JGL. Otherwise they've undermined everything anyway, why not go with someone new and launch batman from this flick.

They need a new Batman.  They have to reboot a Batman that can actually hang with a new DC universe.

Wouldn't make sense unless it was for the Superman movie and Justice League. You don't pay that much to get him back for one movie and then risk having to get someone new for the movie they're putting in this effort to build up to.

It makes absolutely no sense to try to hire Bale. This is a dumb story made up to generate page views.

Anyway, if they wanted to link it to dark knight they would be trying to hire JGL.

You guys are over thinking.

I remember Velorath and I were discussing Avengers before it came out about how Thor would be part of the group. I said he would just be part of the group and his appearance would be explained in a single line of throwaway dialog like "welp we repaired the space bridge with space magic yay." Velorath argued that the Thor movie made a very big deal out of him being stuck on Asgard, and that there was no way they would make that a major plot point in Thor without addressing it in Avengers. Well...

I don't think Velorath was wrong in that yes, it was stupid that Avengers didn't address Thor's situation at all. (Or stupid to make that a major plot point in Thor if it was going to be immediately dismissed) But here's the thing - people want to see an Avengers movie. Marvel wants to make an Avengers movie. Neither group is interested in a "how does Thor get back to earth?" movie being the first half of Avengers.

The Batman films are the only good DC films and the most profitable. The reason to make a Batman vs Superman movie is to have Bale fight Superman. It doesn't matter if his back is broken or he has a gimpy leg or is retired - Bale fighting Superman puts dollar signs in the eyes of movie execs. JGL fighting Superman doesn't.

Here's the thing: if you cast Bale as Batman the movie is 100% guaranteed to make tons of money. Even if you pay Bale $100 million. Dark Knight Rises made a billion dollars box office WW. Almost everyone who saw DKR will see Bale Batman vs Superman, even if they don't like the idea.

Here's the other thing: nobody green lights a movie like Batman vs Superman because they think it will be a good movie. It's not because it has a great script, or even any script. It's a money making concept. If you want continuity maybe you get JGL but movie execs want money, not continuity. Movie execs also like prestige and the Nolan / Bale Batman movies are the only superhero movies they have that get any critical acclaim.

I bet every single time this movie comes up at WB the first question is "so do we have Bale as Batman?"

You clearly do not deal with studio execs.

I think my issue with the Avengers thing was honestly less of a problem with Avengers itself, and more just with the general issues like that which crop up when you're intertwining movies from a number of franchises all with different writers and directors, and the planning ahead of how everything links together is always in flux. That's how you get things like a major plot point at the end of Thor being a minor footnote the next time he shows up. Ideally I'd rather have had that shit cut out of Thor, not add more dialog and explanation to Avengers.

In this instance I get WB's point of view if they are in fact desperately trying to get back Bale or Nolan like the rumors constantly swirling around claim they are. They're less worried about story continuity, and more worried about the continuity of making billion dollar worldwide grossing movies. JGL as Batman is an unknown quantity to them. It gives them the negatives of locking into Nolan's continuity without any of the potential benefits (money). Batman as depicted there isn't a Justice League caliber. He's not the super-genius, prepared for every situation, World's Greatest Detective, Batman. JGL's character even less so. You can hand-wave all that away and just make him that guy, but then really, you might as well just go with a new actor as well.

Personally I think they'd be better off working on getting Nolan, because if the writer and director on this next movie are shit or even just average, Bale isn't going to save it any more than he did that last Terminator movie, and really in the best movie of the trilogy, Bale was practically a supporting role. Honestly though, I'm a huge fan of Nolan, and would rather see him do more original stuff rather than make more licensed stuff so I kinda hope they don't go that route.

I don't agree with Margalis often, but he's 100% right here.

Execs don't care if a movie "Makes sense."  Only that it makes them money.  This is why we've seen nothing but an endless stream of superhero movies and sequels.  They're money makers.  When they stop making money, things will shift to whatever the next "Movie Bubble" will be.

Historic bubbles:
Epics, Westerns, Comedies, Dramas, 80's Action Movies, Late 70's/ Early 80's Fantasy, (current) Superheros.

They could get Micheal Keaton for 20 times less money, and that would have people chattering too.

DC has to be very worried that the first two movies to try to kick off their Marvel style formula (Green Lantern and Man of Steel) were both bad. Marvel got rolling on the back of Iron Man, a genuinely good movie with a good star. Meanwhile DC has Ryan Reynolds and Henry Cavill in two duds. At this point there's zero reason to care about a group movie or DC films as a universe. If they can't tie in with the Nolan Batman films in some way what do they have left - Flash? Wonder Woman? Martian Manhunter? Hawkgirl? Like...Plastic Man or some shit?

Realistically speaking in seems Flash is the only hope left. Otherwise it will be like trying to combine Ben Affleck's Daredevil, Nic Cage's Ghost Rider and Eric Bana's Hulk into a group.

An older Keaton would work very well actually.

Flash is getting his own show on CW now.  He's getting a backdoor pilot on Arrow this season. 

I'm going to speak only from my position, and fire something back at you. You are over thinking the complaints.

You don't actually have to tell anyone about how the studio works. The reason I'm annoyed at is is simply because it doesn't make sense if they are want to compete with what Marvel is doing. It's just another sign of a misstep for WB/DC.

I also don't think the reason that Nolan's batman films were a success were because of Bale. I liked him in them, and I really enjoy him as an actor, but I don't know if it really matters for the box office draw that it was Bale. First and foremost, Batman is a much more popular cultural character than Superman is. He has a shit ton more name appeal if only because he is saturated in pop culture with 50,000 different animated shows over the last 15 years.

I understand the studios motives for doing what they are doing, I am simply pointing out that it's stupid, and that they should do better. I want an awesome Avengers level Justice League movie and they are doing everything they can to shoot themselves in the foot.

The Dark Knight trilogy was great because you had many amazing people involved: Bale is a solid actor, but you can't consider him without acknowledging the acting talents of Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Heath Ledger, Tom Hardy, JGL, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Anne Hathaway, and Marion Cotillard. That is a mind-blowing roster of acting skill right there, and then behind the camera you have the equally talented Christopher Nolan and Wally Pfister.

Thinking you can take one element of that and plop it into a new franchise - one which already has a pretty terrible premise - and hoping to get something great out of it is a massive overreach.

Not really. Batman is a cultural icon. Show up with Bat-ears and a cape, you don't really have to establish a new "origin." Fuck it's BATMAN. Parents died, kid went crazy, dressed up like Bela Lugosi and beats up criminals. Hell, I don't even think you have to do an origin story on a reboot.

Movie execs, however, are FUCKING IDIOTS who also think they are smarter than their audience. So yes, I can see them throwing bad money at Bale to try to shoehorn his Batman in this movie. But really, after the success of Man of Steel, it's not necessary. You have a built-in audience. The movie was a success. You don't NEED Bale especially not at that price. This is a bullshit story - at least I hope it is.

EDIT: Also, Margalis what are you smoking? Man of Steel was not a dud. It did over $288 million DOMESTICALLY on a $225 million dollar budget. Total worldwide = $648 million. That's an unqualified success by any standard.

If batman never leaves the suit it's one thing but the moment you have Bruce Wayne in a movie it will be jarring to see anyone not Nolan.  The batman movies are simply too recent and fresh in peoples minds to be used to another actor without the mask.  A non Bruce movie could work but you are seriously tying your wrists together when it comes to the script and especially to sequels which is something the studios likely want to avoid at all(60mil) costs.

Tangent: I'm still amused at this because I remember when the exact opposite was true.

But... Bale ISN'T Bats now. If it's "fresh in peoples minds", then it can't be Bale.

The only way they could do that is to have both Bale and JGL in it and JGL goes down and Bale "Returns", which arguably could work just fine. But I still don't want Snyder directing that trainwreck.

They can recast Batman without any problem. The real question is, "What Batman are they thinking of having?" The moment it's Bale's Batman, the whole thing stops making a lot of sense. E.g., these two characters EVEN IN their respective films ("Begins" to "Rise" for Batman; "Man of Steel" for Superman) don't really belong in the same universe. They have no iconic charge off of each other, they don't really represent opposites. They have no relation. It also fucks up the idea that the appearance of Superman in "Man of Steel" catalyzes the emergence of superheroes--Batman would have introduced the concept some years previously, and if we're to believe the end of "Rise", some sort of Batman has been operating ever since even with Bruce Wayne retiring, which you get no sense of at all in "Man of Steel".

If it's true, it's a terrible indicator quite aside from showing that these are guys who waste money in nearly criminal fashion.

No that just means it barely broke even (or maybe are still losing money) once you add in distribution and marketing costs. A movie like Man Steel probably cost WB around $350 - $400 million total. So far they gotten about $300 - $350 million in revenue. Not only do people still not understand that studios only get about half the box office receipts they spend *a lot* of money on marketing these "tentpole" movies as in $100 - $150 million or more in extra costs.

To give you a concrete example Disney took a $200 million write down on John Carter. World wide it grossed $282,778,100 and it had an estimated production budget of $250 million.

So using my formula above you get something like $150 million in revenue - $250 million in production costs - $100 million in marketing and distribution costs = $200 million write down

The sequel is already greenlit - thus it obviously made them enough money that it cannot be considered a dud.

Remember that studio accounting is essentially a lie no matter which way it seems to come out. It is never entirely clear who made money, what kind of money they made, or from what exactly they made it. I heard a sort of insider's talk from a producer last spring where he talked about the actual revenue streams that actually made meaningful profits for studios and investors and by his account the totality is so byzantine that only a small handful of people on any given film really know how much it's made and when that got made. Basically each film is sold at least three, sometimes five times. The theatrical take is the biggest revenue stream but some films surprise and bring in a lot in the later parts of the cycle. (Less so now with the DVD market falling so fast.)

Incidentally this guy also pointed out that the really painful thing is that the occupancy rate on theaters Monday-Thursday is usually under 5% even in summer. I pointed out that restaurants and bars have much better weekday occupancy than that, so why not press theater owners to adopt a model more like the Alamo Drafthouse, where every night is an event and where the theater owners would have a more diversified revenue stream for themselves to boot? His basic answer is: because it's a totally separate industry and Hollywood has almost no influence over how theater owners operate, but on the other hand, theater owners produce the most important revenue for Hollywood. So they're dependent on theater owners and yet can do little to nothing to suggest alternative strategies for getting butts in seats beyond marketing--or doing dumb things like paying Christian Bale $50 million. Which is why someone wants to pay him $50 million--it's how a Hollywood exec proves he's doing something to improve the bottom line, by getting casting that will get a big open, even if the cost of the casting actually makes it way more challenging to make money on the product.

Reportedly (it's on the wiki entries) the LOTR trilogy was a huge financial loss.  :awesome_for_real:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Line_Cinema

Holy crap that's a good idea.

In the context of any other medium, I'd totally agree. Rocksteady certainly didn't need to worry about this for Arkham Asylum :-)

But in the context of movies, there's a reason his origin story is told in every movie every time they introduce a new actor. Batman's origin is retold more often than freakin' 007 at this point.

Because it's not about Batman. It's about the movie that happens to feature an icon but which is otherwise completely subsumed by the seat-filling A-list actor likely to rally other actors and support staff to the project. Even if the link on page 3 is to a link-trolling article, you know they're driving trucks of cash over to Bale's house until he capitulates, pulls a diva tantrum, or escapes into a contract for another movie. This isn't about Batman's origin but rather Here's Why We Picked This Guy for Batman origin.

Which the way can be said all about Superman too.

Then add in the layer of importance to DC in general. They don't have an Avengers. They haven't established JLA at all, and obviously haven't figured out how to or they would have. Their entire lineup of movies is almost entirely Superman and Batman titles. Almost 60 years after the first Batman movie hit theaters, they're only now considering having both characters together. Maybe they think/hope that'll kickstart JLA, or maybe they realize these two are the only ones they can do right or something.

Whatever it is, you don't leave that kind of stuff up to any kind of financial chance at all.

I don't think it's even really a matter of whether Man of Steel made or lost money. WB had to have been expecting more from it. The pre-release hype and early ticket sales got the sequel greenlit before the movie even came out. They were riding on a wave of anticipation that looks like it started to die out the week after release with a fairly large 64.6% weekend to weekend drop as the bad reviews and word of mouth started coming out. Dark Knight Rises was similarly high with a 61.4% drop but even then that was partly a result of what happened in Auora. If you adjust for inflation and take 3D upcharges into account, Man of Steel's numbers are pretty comparable to Superman Returns domestically.

That and the $170 million it made in licensing deals alone before the film was even released (which doesn't include the pre-sales for other distribution channels)

 A big dumb movie with a lot of marketing behind it that can play overseas like Man of Steel is going to make money. I called it a dud because it had no critical acclaim, poor word of mouth and didn't rake in as much as WB was probably hoping. A lot of people were taken by the hype, saw the movie and came away disappointed, which doesn't mean good things for a sequel.

Iron Man 3 made almost twice as much money at the BO.

I've only skimmed the last page or so, so my apologies if I'm repeating someone's point, but:

To all those thinking that Bale isn't necessary to Batman, consider the screams of outrage every time someone tries to release a Batman game without using Kevin Conroy, or how the only 'real' Joker is Mark Hamill. Any Batman film without Bale is going to attract complaints that it doesn't have Bale and he's the only person who can really play Batman. This is despite all the people who said that Bale was too soft / pretty to play Batman before the first film.

Fans are morons. They don't know what they want until you shove it in their face, then if they like it they pretend that was what they always wanted. If they don't like it, they'll complain that you should have gone with what they said.

As for Bale: that money is insurance that if "Superman Vs Batman" flops it wasn't because they should have put Bale in the film. It's a job insurance payment. And it will get fans of the other Batman films - the serious comic book films that everyone raved about - in to see the new movie as well.

Bale is no RDJ and does not deserve 60 mil. 

"Deserves" has nothing to do with it. None of these guys deserve even a tenth of the money they are paid. But it's probably not a bad investment. If another actor would cost say 10 million you're paying 50 million extra. Are you going to make 50 million more in combined box office, DVDs, etc? Probably.

Similarly if you're Marvel it's probably worth it to pay RDJ $100+ million. It's crazy but the return on investment is there.

I think Bale's draw is a tad overestimated here. Batman Begins didn't do anywhere near the money the second two movies did. Heath Ledger and to a much lesser extent Aaron Eckhart helped carry the second movie, which in turn created goodwill for the third. Bale did a good job as Wayne, but his Batman voice got nothing but mockery, and Bale is not a sure-fire box office bet by any means nor do I think he was what put asses in seats for these movies.

Also Unsub, if you want to see fan backlash imagine the nerd rage if the Nolan/Bale Batman is "tarnished" by being put into a crap Superman movie that ends up around 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. Also Bale has very vocally made it clear he doesn't really want to come back. In the long term it doesn't make sense to try to build to the Justice League movie and its sequels unless they can get him locked down to a 2-3 movie deal.

I can see why the Studio would want to try, but to me it's one of those things that only looks like the safe bet until you really start analyzing it.

It's not that Bale has innate draw, it's that in moviegoers' minds, he is Batman.  Period.  I don't think anyone since Adam West has done the role for that long (Keaton only did two movies, right?), or with nearly as much box office success.  Even if he wasn't the one putting the asses in the seats, the association has been forged.

Mark Hamill wasn't the one putting the asses in the seats for Star Wars, but try to imagine if they'd cast somebody else as Luke in Return of the Jedi.

This is more like casting someone else for the trilogy Disney is doing.  Yeah, people *want* Luke, Han, and Leia to actually *be* older versions of the same characters, and the most elegant way to do that is to give the parts to actors that actually are thirty years older in the same roles.  But if Ford or Fisher didn't sign on, they'll cast someone else and nobody will give a shit, any more than Palpatine had to be the same actor in the prequels.

--Dave

Luke isn't really a fair comparison. It's more like if they cast someone new as James Bond.

Where I do agree is that you wouldn't choose to introduce a new bond in the first ever Bond vs Transformers movie. Of course, I wouldn't ever make a Bond vs Transformers movie, but once you start down that road....

This isn't Return of the Jedi though unless I missed the part where Luke teamed up with Superman and George Lucas had already moved on to other things. They aren't replacing Bale mid-storyline. To me, getting upset about Bale not coming back to the role for this would be like getting upset if they didn't cast him as Bruce Wayne in Arrow. I'm about as big a comic nerd as you're likely to find on these boards and I can't be bothered to summon nerd rage at the possibility of someone new being cast as Batman. That's partly because "hey guys Batman is gonna be in the next Superman movie" was news that excited me for about two minutes before I remembered Man of Steel, and partly because I though Bale was often the weakest link of Nolan's cast (but hey, he was great in The Fighter at least).  RDJ is Iron Man. Bale is the guy that happened to be wearing a Batman suit in that one Heath Ledger movie.

I'd agree with this.  Plus, it's not as if modern movie goers aren't used to batman switching around.  West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney, Bale, just for "Big" live action performances.  Bale just happened to be the last on the list. 

Bitching at this point is like the folks who bitched in 1989 that West wasn't Batman. (And yes, it did happen.)  You're replacing a concept with another.  Would West's camp fit in 1989? Fuck no.  Would Bale's fit S vs B? Depends on the script, but I certainly never saw that Batman display the intellect & cunning required to take-out the man of steel. He was the detective, not the strategist.

Hell if you want to get all pedantic about it, even Conroy isn't the "only" batman voice for the last 20 years and there's only been rage from the nerdiest of nerdy nerds about it.

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000177/?ref_=tt_cl_t1

If there's any character in the world that can be recast at will, it's Batman. That's not a hypothetical, it's a demonstrated reality. The audience for Nolan's trilogy was there first for *Nolan*: it was his take on the character that really sold the films. Second they were there for Heath Ledger and stayed around for the third film.

As long as they don't put a wildly inappropriate guy in the cowl, they can do anybody really. The only thing that matters is having them decide which Batman this is and how he fits into a universe that has a Superman. That cannot be the Nolan Batman--that will fuck the film up right there and then. It can't be Miller's Batman from DKR either--that character is totally dependent upon a long-established relation between Batman and Superman.

Kilmer was 1995, Clooney was 1997.  The target "modern movie goer" demographic wasn't old enough to see those movies when they came out.   :awesome_for_real:

And yet the Bond franchise, for as bad as some of those movies have done, have gone along just fine with new actors playing Bond (as well as a lot of the supporting cast as well).

Batman, like Bond, has become a cultural icon. To anyone that is 30 years old, Batman has already been portrayed by at least 2 people, up to 4 people if you are old enough to go back to the first or second Keaton movie. Moviegoers really aren't tied to one actor for iconic roles. Hell, they've already seen 2 Supermen in the last decade. 2 Bilbo Baggins. Moviegoers aren't going to boycott Superman 2 because Christian Bale isn't playing Batman - nerdragers MIGHT (but probably won't) but as movies like Pac Rim and Snakes on a Plane have already proven, THOSE DIEHARD FANS DO NOT FUCKING MATTER TO HOLLYWOOD.

$60 million is a CRAZY STUPID amount of money for one actor who isn't even the main star of the movie. Maybe if that much cash is being tossed around to sign Bale up for 2-3 movies, maybe I could see that. But that's not what this story would have us believe. That's why I call it a bullshit story. Any idiot that pays an actor that much money based off the performance of his last movie (which really only did about 4-5 times that amount of money total) deserves to have their studio burned to the ground.

I don't think a studio is looking at this in terms of boycotting or nerd rage -- they don't give a flying fuck about nerds.  We all know this.  What they're going to look at it in terms of is whether the average idiot is going to see the trailer and accept this movie as part of the latest Batman franchise (which has a proven track record) and go see it on that basis, or if they're going to think it looks like some kind of Asylum ripoff and wait for it to hit Netflix.

I think people actually want the person playing Bond to change over time. Ideally each actor would get three-four films as Bond, then they get someone new in.

Batman movies are about the fucking Batman. Nobody gives a shit who fills the suit so long as Batman does Batman shit, to villains, while using gadgets that are bad ass and clever.

Is that what people want, or is that just what they expect?

Sounds good to me.

Doesn't matter which it is. People expect it, therefore they want whatever the new Bond is. Bond films have to really suck to seriously lose the audience and that has a bit to do with the Bond in question seeming a bit old hat and a lot to do with the film really, really sucking.

True. But if that's the case, having Bale wasn't the problem with the film. It was then the script or the director.

If a new actor - say one person who's be tapped to be Batman before and but the Justice League movie didn't take, Armie Hammer - takes on the role, and the film flops, then studio heads would roll because they didn't get Bale.

It's a case of making the safe, conservative decision of getting Bale or risking it on a new actor who may or may not deliver.

Personally I'm fine with a new actor for Batman. And a director who can actually shoot decent fight scenes, unlike Nolan.

This. It's all about ROI. These movies cost to much to take unnecessary chances. A Hollywood exec ASSUMES Bale is Batman in this movie in the same breathe they assume Cavill is. 10 years ago they'd ASSUME it's George Clooney. 20 years ago it'd have been Keaton.

All the talk of Batman being some cultural icon suit anyone can fill the role of is bullshit in their minds because they don't make movies about suits. They make movies about actors and actresses who play roles in stories.

Bond works because we're all used to decades of new actors. But dig up some exec from the transition era from Connery to Moore and ask them what kind of risk they thought they were taking (and have smelling salts ready for when they remember Lazenby). And THEN layer that wiith the anticipation of a match up that has NEVER been told outside of comic books only the truly hardcore geeks are even aware of, and certainly not in the brainspace of anyone making a decision about bankrolling a $100mm+ flick.

This is where the realities of the business decision making engine run smack into the creative expectations of fans.

Moore wasn't that much of a risk. He had already been playing a bond-ish character for quite some time with The Saint. He even made a couple of movies as The Saint, as it happens.

The thing people forget about Lazenby is that the studios were actually very happy with him. He just turned down the role of Bond as he didn't want to do it anymore. He was actually pretty good in the one film he was in, but people can't look at it now without picking out the faults as "there had to have been some reason he was dropped."

OHMSS was a financial, artistic, and critical success, broadly in line with the rest of the Bond canon.

I don't know where people get the idea from that it was either bad or unsuccessful. It is no From Russia with Love, but it is a better film than anything Piers Brosnan has ever been involved in.

I'm not talking about retrospect. I'm talking about the specific period when the people bankrolling films had to accept a transition away from Connery (before layering in the ++ stress of a long-in-coming matchup). Decades and a few Bonds later, it's no more an issue than there being 50 Dr Who's. Shit, a second Kirk actor wasn't any more of an issue than a second BA Baracus because in both cases the prior presentations of those characters were for completely different generations of viewers.

Five years from now a non-Bale Batman in a Superman/Batman mashup is probably fine if you accept what I said even earlier about needing to spend a chunk of movie establishing both actors in the roles, possibly enough to require a trilogy or establishing single-character movies leading into.

But this is coming soon enough after Dark Knight Rises that the execs really think Bale is required.

With all that said, I personally don't care. But nobody's made a movie targeting me in 15 years. I'm just trying to see this from the business manager angle.

Hey there's an idea: cast some random bloke as Batman and have Kevin Conroy overdub him.

lol.

Let's fuck with things and give it to Idris Elba.

Ben Afflek. (http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/08/22/ben-affleck-batman/)

Shine on, you crazy Diamond, DC.

Hey, I have an idea. Let's get the guy that fucked up the closest equivalent to Batman in the Marvel Universe...

I am dumb-fucking founded by this casting.  I thought I was pessimistic about this film before, but now I'm dreading it.  I could be surprised, but the odds seem to be getting longer and longer...

And let's all be honest: If you lined up all of the Batmen you've ever seen on screen and had to pick one that you'd guess Affleck would end up being most like, who would it be?  After Daredevil, I've got to go Kilmer.

Ugh.

The first image that came to mind on reading this news:

(http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7ut3aILNN1qeitqh.gif)

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

Wow, they have just made it so that I would probably pay money NOT to see this movie.

And now paying $60 million for Bale looks even less crazy.

That's it, I'm out.  Ben Fucking Afflek?  He's a decent director, but as an actor...he's a decent director.

--Dave

OHMSS is my favourite Bond film ever.




Affleck?  What the Pope resign or something?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/nononononono.gif)

Ben Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms yo!

Expect.

BUT GUYS PEOPLE EXPECT BATMAN TO BE PLAYED BY RANDOM JACKASSES

hahahaha, Affleck.

(http://i.imgur.com/k7dTaLj.jpg)

To be fair the argument was random actors.  Only crazy people consider Affleck a real actor rather than a guy who rode his more talented friends coattails.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v307/Rendakor/bunksmh.gif)

 :ye_gods:

Well. Trying to think of what they're thinking. Not able to think of it. It isn't even worth trying to nerd-reason out the consequences.

Does Affleck even have a specific audience demo that likes him any more?  I have a feeling he lobbied for the role to try and revive his acting career.

I also predict that there will be a loud, negative reaction to this from the comic book fanbase, enough to get him removed.  Going out on a limb there, but what the hell.

That can't happen. I mean, he played a comic book author already!! What more does he have to prove?!?  :why_so_serious:

suck it geeks. You wanted to be mainstream and this is what you got.

so the buttsex guy from mallrats is gonna be batman?

So, I don't like the pick. I like Affleck well enough, both as a director and an actor, but I just don't see the fit. Given his success in directing/acting as is, I'm not sure he has to revive anything. Dude was just up for oscars.

As for the negative reaction. It's there , but not nearly enough to get him removed. Has that ever ever happened?

I'm a bit ambivalent. I like Affleck as both actor and director. I think he'll be fine as Bruce Wayne. I'm not entirely sure he'll be good as Batman but I think that's going to be down more to the director than the actor as to how he's played.

I think this is more about who gets to direct the Justice League movie than it is who gets to play Batman. The studio likely wanted an actor who was willing to commit a good bit to their franchises - more than most actors will want to do. Affleck probably said "let me direct the Justice League and you can pay me less and I'll sign up for umpteen pictures." And if he directs Justice League, that is a good thing.

As for Affleck in Daredevil, the problems with that movie had fuckall to do with who was playing the main character. That movie started going bad with the writer and director, went on into poor studio choices and ended with poor editing choices.

He doesn't have enough lip charisma for Batman.

Let's go through the checklist:

1.) An actor that failed as Marvel's 'Poor Man's Batman,
2.) A storyline based upon a long standing relationship between two heroes,
3.) Locking a foundational franchise in their combined universe into a 41 year old actor with no geek cred, and
4.) An actor that tried to play 'gravitas' repeatedly and always come off like his character from Mallrats.

I'm usually a benefit of the doubt kind of guy, but I'd be shocked if this is not a trainwreck.  I applaud WB for the balls to make a decision that their fandom will hate because they think they know better... but if the Comic Con 2014 footage does not blow us away, they're going to be SCREWED.

Do we know for certain that Cavill is Superman?  Because if they get Damon instead this will be movie of the year.

:drill:

The Affleck director thing is not something that is happening. I actually like that idea of him directing that movie quite a lot now that you mention it, but it just seems like it would be a trainwreck of a time dealing with Snyder, etc during that kind of transition.


I don't disagree with you about Daredevil though. I thought he was fine in it. It was just a shitty movie. He was hardly the reason for it being shitty.


Cavill is Sups again, yes.

Damon = Robin, clearly.

Someone pointed out that the internet chucked a massive wobbly when Heath Ledger was named as the Joker....

You can argue that Affleck was not the main problem with Daredevil, but he was a problem.  I'm sorry, but the guy has no force of personality at all, and Batman and Daredevil are all about force of personality.  You need an actor that can stare down a foe in a way that gives the audience shivers - not giggles.

Seriously, can you think of a single moment in anything he has ever done where he was (*in any way*) threatening? He's played a super hero, a fallen angel, a driller/astronaught, a marine trained CIA operative, and Basketball Player #10 in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie).  He has had plenty of opportunity to show us that he can intimidate.  Was there ever a single moment when he evoked 'bad-ass'?  Is there ever a moment that you don't think he'd be the guy to blink first?  

Seriously - Hugh Jackman is a singing and dancing fool when he wants to be, but is there any doubt about which one of those two can summon more intensity?

And before we go down that road: This isn't a Michael Keaton situation.  Keaton wasn't an obvious choice for Batman, but he did well.  Keaton doesn't have that threatening face, but he could be intense.  He could summon that intensity and be the Batman.  Affleck has never shown the fire that it takes.

I'd much rather they went with a fairly unknown guy than go with the big name that doesn't have the mettle and spirit to be Batman.  

Affleck didn't help Daredevil, but I agree that movie had way bigger problems than him.

Damon should be cast as Lex Luthor.

I could be completely wrong since I'm not going to look into it, but I remember the Ledger stuff being more like "Huh, odd choice, we will see what happens." where Affleck is just more outright "NOPE".

I think I'm a rarity that I didn't like the way Joker was written in TDK.  Ledger's acting was great, but the character didn't feel like the Joker to me.

Affleck can direct, he can even act but he can't carry a movie and that people keep wanting him to be a leading man is ridiculous.

You are completely wrong. There was a lot of homophobic shit especially, given Brokeback Mountain. His joker was the perfect joker for that more realistic/gritty universe.

Affleck is just not a good actor. He's pretty much the same in every role, and while it works for some people it definitely doesn't work for him.

Ledger/Joker and Affuck/Batman are worlds apart.

First, the lashing against Ledger was there, but it wasn't overwhelming.  It was the usual minority backlash you see with any major casting. 

Second, Ledger had never really been called on to do that type of role and failed.  It was a situation where people could say, "I can't see how this will work."  It was not a situation in which you'd say, "I've seen this fail a number of times already."

He's not just the same in every role, he's an angry and/or sulking young man with an overinflated ego in every role. Even in Argo.

Bruce Wayne could be played as a sulky man, but he can't really be played as inexperienced.


The only shit around Ledger was from unwashed idiots whose opinion people here generally give zero fucks about.

I am sorta going this route as well. I liked Bale as Batman, but thought he was horrible as Bruce. I think Ben will be opposite.

(https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/1175687_462627227184818_1007538927_n.jpg)

And if this was Clark Kent vs. Bruce Wayne....

--Dave

Batman is three characters.  Batman, public Bruce Wayne, and private Bruce Wayne. 

We've discussed Affleck as Batman.  Nobody seems likely to change their mind about how well this will work.

Affleck as the public Bruce Wayne?  Sure.  Why not.  In a way, this is an irrelevant role in the movie.  He could be played like Tony Stark, or he could be a complete fop.  There are a thousnad ways to go, there, and it would be hard to argue any of them is wrong.  This role is just a disguise for the main character with no real importance to the audience.

Bruce Wayne in private, however, is the hardest role.  He is Batman without the theatrics.  He is Batman stripped down to his soul.  He has to be intense and powerful through the force of his presence.  I don't think Bale nailed this part of Batman.  It is one of the reasons I think the third movie was the weakest of the trilogy - because it was the one movie that relied heaviest upon what made Bruce Wayne special.  This is the part of the character that Affleck has tried to show in other roles and always failed to produce.  To me, it seems far beyond his abilities.

Very well, put. Thank you. Agreed. Mind you in the context of this movie, given the director, I'm not sure the private Bruce Wayne will ever be shown.

Affleck didn't write or direct Daredevil, I don't really think he bears the blame for it. Good actors are usually bad in bad movies, a bad director or bad script can ruin just about anyone. It's really pretty rare where you get something like Anthony Perkins turning in a great performance in Psycho 2 in the service of an otherwise horrible movie.

(http://i.imgur.com/KaBv2aJ.jpg)

I'm going to go with 'I don't care' for this whole furore.

Really.

Though I will say that Ben is a great Director and, as an actor, he's a great Director.

So... possibly Cranston as Lex. And 13 fucking picture deal for Affleck? Jesus fuck. (http://movies.cosmicbooknews.com/content/exclusive-bryan-cranston-lex-luthor-batman-superman-matt-damon-aquaman-mark-strong-sinestro)

That one line makes me think this story is not true and that the web site owner is just fucking with us. Damon as Aquaman? Really?

yessssssssss

(http://i.imgur.com/LciE6qK.gif)

Meh, I don't mind that Affleck is Bats, but he'll need to show some gravitas he's never shown in a movie before.

Loved Argo and The Town.

Reindeer Games is on right now.  True fact!

I plan to enjoy every last minute of this metaphorical train wreck.

Matt Damon and Sarah Silverman as the wonder twins.

It isn't about him acting 'good or bad' in the past - it is about whether he can deliver Batman.  Affleck has played a number of roles that should have been intense with a strong force of personality.  In each of them he has failed to deliver.  Daredevil, Jack Ryan, a fallen Angel, etc... were all characters that should have been forces on the screen and ended up coming off as guys along for the ride.  You can't say that was all bad direction and bad writing.  Affleck must be given the blame as well. 

To be clear: Affleck was fine in several roles, but has never been acceptable in roles like Batman.

Regardless, even if he was the perfect Batman, this is a horrible situation.  Introducing Batman in another hero's film - in a franchise that many considered to start weekly primarily due to a lack of faithfullness to the character's core tennants - in a version of a storyline that is built upon the long term relationship between the two characters... Recipe for failure.   Batman needed his own film before you shoved them together.

(http://i.imgur.com/RViEHVx.gif)

I'm not anywhere near the level of geek about Batman heritage as some here. I loved me some of the graphic novels, but I haven't read an actual I-waited-a-month comic book since, like ever because my parents said no fucking way and I was into Zork before I had spending money of my own.

So far my interest has been mostly "if not Bale, then who" and how much movie they need to use to explain the Actor choice.

Ben Affleck can work specifically because of Daredevil. Doesn't matter if that was an awesome movie. It matters that he's got pretty good butts-in-seats appeal, has a pretty good range, can possibly bring other talent on board, and played some dark-ish hero-type a hundred years ago.

This is why I love the general nerd reaction to any decision hollywood makes about beloved comic book stuff. There is NO overlap between culturess at all. There''s barely 15 degrees of seperation even, much less 6.

Afflleck will be fine. It won't be robot jesus wearing a suit of ken miller. But good luck explaining wtf that means to anyone outside the extreme geek subculture.

...Actually Damon kinds of looks like I would imagine Aquaman to look.

And people are misremembering the reaction to Ledger. It was intense, near-universal and sustained in its hostility.

The thing is I have no confidence in *Snyder* to find some potential in Affleck and to shape it. He didn't do very much with Cavill who I think could have been far better in the role, and I don't think he's ever gotten a particularly great performance out of anyone except maybe Gerard Butler, and that was within the one-dimensional limits of 300.

A great director can probably get a passable performance out of almost anyone. Snyder is not that guy.

The basic problem with the film is also still not Affleck and maybe not even Snyder. It's that they don't have a script and they expect to be out in two years, and that they're working from the flawed set up of Man of Steel.  What they're saying so far and confirmed with the casting of Affleck is that this is an older, experienced, near-retired Batman who's already had a bunch of adventures. Did the world of "Man of Steel" feel like the people in it were familiar with the idea of a guy dressing up in a costume and fighting criminals? Didn't to me.

I really think you're overplaying the Ledger stuff.

I didn't see Dark Knight in theaters, mostly because I thought Ledger would be a horrible Joker. I was wrong, but I'm certainly among those who thought it was a bad choice before seeing the film.

I wasn't a fan of the Glasgow Grin, but I didn't mind the choice of Actor.

I'm just saying that it wasn't as universally 'OMG' as Affleck.  Not that I'm bothered by that either.

Let's wait and see, eh ?  Especially considering we have absolutely no fucking choice in the matter.

We don't have argue about the Ledger Joker reaction because this is the internet and you can look it up right here...
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=7786.0

The only person who had a problem with it was Stray, and he got over it in about a day.

This is not like that.

I give only limited fucks because this is both a superman film and a Zac Snyder film, so Ben Affleck is at least the 3rd worst thing about it. But this is not the normal level of nerd whine by any means.

Ben Affleck has no face character.  The most important thing about Batman is his face... especially the bottom bit.  Same is true for Robo Cop.  We need more face!  Especially interesting lips.  I would love to see Cranston as a totally evil character. 

IW, you are a hooligan and you are corrupting our soft American boys!  Shame on you!

I.. what ?

Your Glasgow grin.  I haven't heard that for ages and only out of the mouths of Scots.  Well, there's Chelsea but they call it something else.  Of course, maybe it's different now because of Tommy Flannagan - whom I adore, scars and all.  

edit:  I make typo!

I thought everyone called it that.

I think she's saying you touch little boys.

I hope going with Affleck means they aren't doing Batman as "the Dark Knight" but as "the Detective"; not that I don't like the first but I'd rather see another interpretation and I think it's a better fit for Affleck.

I'm amazed more people haven't picked up on this because all I can think is the ending to the "How It Should Have Ended" clips.

I'm certain that the writers have a vision, but they are competing with the memory of Bale as Batman. To me it stinks of them just trying to focus an audience on Superman again by using a character that seems to be a lot more popular than Superman, but by using an actor that is not established as Batman.

I think if there's one thing they're doing right here, it's that we don't need another Batman origin movie. Multiple generations have been exposed to the character already. If a new Batman shows up in a Superman movie people aren't going to be asking themselves "who the hell is this guy in a bat suit?".

Problem is even knowing batman there are still many differing versions of him.  Is the batman/superman batman the same as the nolan batman with a different actor? Is morgan freeman going to pop up? is Ras dead/alive? Is the joker? 

With a new actor and no backstory there are a lot of questions, irregardless of how well known batman is.

Anybody who gives a fuck about any of those questions is already going to know going into the movie that it's not the Nolan Batman. We're still just under two years away from this movie, and WB is out there loudly saying it's not the same character. The phrase "entirely new incarnation" was in the press release which every major news outlet has reported on.

These arguments about these hypothetical moviegoers who are going to be so confused by the change are really a bit ridiculous. By the time July 2015 rolls around and God knows how much marketing the public has endured, what do you think the percentage of movie goers who are interested in seeing a Superman/Batman movie but don't know it's not a continuation of the Nolan stuff is really going to be? The younger audience is already flooded with this stuff on twitter, and older people have been through multiple reboots of the character enough to understand how it works. Is there really a significant number of people who are going to be watching the movie unable to wrap their head around the fact that this is a different take on the character, but that the character is still likely a rich guy whose parents were killed which made him decide to fight crime in a bat costume?

I went to a production of "the Tempest" last month, I was sorely disappointed to discover that Prospero was not only played by different actor to that which I saw previously, but also was back on the island which he had previously escaped! Also Miranda and Ferdinand were acting like they had never met despite being married in the previous production!

People can cope with 'its a new continuity'. Nobody expected the Dark Knight to respect the Adam West continuity.

I don't think anyone will be confused about who the Batman is or what his motivations are in general. But it has a huge impact on the world-building they're doing if they're trying to work up to a Justice League.

Look at the subtle but persistent effects in Marvel movies of the sequence of characters being introduced and an account of how long they've been around and in what way.

"JL-World" will be very different if we're meant to believe that Batman in his outfit with his gimmicks has been a known part of life in Gotham City for a decade vs. if instead Bruce Wayne has been an unseen ninja fighting crime for his entire adult life but decides to put on a spandex uniform when he sees Superman on the TV.

 :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :grin: :why_so_serious:

There are not a hundred different versions of the tempest.  There is no communist Prospero or a female Prospero, it's the same story note by note every time.  The only constant in batman is "parent's die" and in some comics not even that.

Actually directors do sometimes cast Prospero as female just to shake things up. Shakespeare is a bad/good example to bring up here depending on what side you're on--a different staging, different casting, different choices of abridgement, can make a Shakespeare play completely different from one performance to the next, and often does. No one really noted or cared much about the colonial subtext of The Tempest until relatively recently, and now that's become the major staging or concept in most performances of it.

Honestly not sure if serious.

You do know Helen Mirren only recently shot a version playing Prospero?

Unless I just fell into the sarchasm you need to get out to the theatre more.

There are a lot more constants than that. Virtually every non-comic depiction of Batman from Adam West to Christian Bale including the various animated series and the Arkham video games has included him being rich and having a mansion, the Batcave and the Batmobile, a butler/father figure named Alfred, his archenemy being the Joker, Catwoman being a enemy/ally/love interest, Commissioner Gordon being one of his biggest allies, etc...

Yeah there are a lot of versions of Batman but they mainly vary in regards to how dark or light-hearted the writing is, and to what extent the writers choose to play up his intellect or his fighting ability. With a good writer, you can establish that in about 5 minutes of screen time. I maintain that the biggest problem is that Goyer and Snyder are two of the most insanely inconsistent people working in the industry.

That said, there really is no reason you couldn't do a medieval batman, a steam punk batman, female batman, or batman 3013. The only reason it doesn't get shaken up as much as Shakespeare is the insidious, chilling effect of IP law.

There will never be another set of plays, characters, or stories reinterpreted the way Shakespeare is because of the power of corporate interests to rewrite copyright law for their own benefit.

(http://i2.wp.com/www.geeksaresexy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ben.jpg?resize=600%2C1390)

I do not think we need to redo an origin story for Batman.  If you decided to do it, you could do it as a montage during the opening credits, or have Batman do it in a 3 to 5 minute flashback.  However, even though the origin doesn't need to be redone, you MUST establish this Batman on screen.  If he is going to carry a movie in the future, you have to establish who he is.  Is this a mirror of Bale's Batman?  Or Keaton's?  Or is it more like the Detective depicted in animated Batman shows?  Or something else?

Go back and think about your favorite action movies.  If they focus on one character (like Die Hard): How well do you get to know the secondary characters?  If this is a Superman movie with Batman, we're not going to get to know him very well.  If, on the other hand, we treat it like a buddy movie (like Tango & Cash or Lethal Weapon): Is there any character that was fleshed out deeply?  Usually the answer is no.  They instead rely upon you not understanding the depths of the character to make them a mystery and to make you unsure how they'll react in stressful times.  Does that type of uncertainty work in Batman and Superman movies?  I don't think so.

This is a movie where you need to remind people who Superman is, introduce Batman, introduce the villian (Luthor?), establish the conflict, have a conflict between Batman and Superman, twist the resolution to turn them against the villain and then have the final conflict.  In a story with those elements, you need to establish Batman in the first third of the movie AFTER reintroducing Superman.  That gives you about 15 to 20 minutes to give us the character of Batman.  And, as Affleck couldn't do it if we gave him 5 days to do it...

Well, if anything, this has at least brought the scum to the surface.

You know, that type of horrid person that thought Keaton did a good job.


 :why_so_serious:

I don't understand the comic strip. Affleck is not good in Argo. He's the biggest flaw in the film. This is not an unusual sentiment.

The town and Argo are remarkable for being good despite the director's performance as an actor.

Context.

I don't know how old you are, but if you saw what had come before in terms of Superhero movies and then saw Keaton's Batman at release, you'd have no doubt that it was a huge leap forward.  If you look back now, it doesn't hold up as well - much as Star Wars does not hold up and provide the same magic it did when released - but the Keaton Batman was incredible for the time. 

Keaton did a fantastic job.

Yeah, it was the first (to me probably) time the geek culture really were vocal about displeasure in casting.  They should have been more worried about Prince's crazy-ass soundtrack.  Maybe Keaton and Burton took it to heart, he was the greatest Batman EVAR.

If you disagree I hope you like being wrong.  :grin:

Keaton was a smary and troubled Bruce but as batman he was more hampered by the suit and Burton having no idea how to do action than anything to do with acting.

I actually watch Batman Returns every Christmas. Its a perfect Christmass movie for me and, for me, holds up really well. The entire cast was fantastic.

Well. Sometimes you have your opinion of people confirmed by unexpected evidence. Today is such a moment for me.

So... the fact that I like to watch a movie set around Christmass at Christmass means what exactly?

With the exception of the dance scene between Pfieffer and Keaton, the rest of that movie is absolute, utter shit of the worst kind.

The problems with the Burton Batman movies had nothing to do with Keaton, BTW.

I tend to watch it as Pheiffer, Keaton, Walken and DeVito having a great time and acting their ass off. The 4 of them carry the movie and it would have been utterly stupid without them putting in a stellar performance. Besides when the rest of my family insist on watching shit like "the Santa Clause"  oer and over, 5 times in one day at Christmas, Batman Returns gives me a welcome sense of relief.

Besides, why be biased. Hell, the sexes are equal with their erogenous zones blown sky high.

I think Rises proves that the actor doesn't matter for the quality of the Batman. Costume design, fight choreography and writing in lots of gadgets and smart ass Batman tricks and tactics for Batman to use make a good Batman along with a ton of other non actor stuff. That's why the quality of the Batman scenes even though it was still Bale were so fucking awful compared to the first two.

Keaton's Bruce Wayne was good to great and that's really the only parts the actor has full control over. He may have been a lazy fuck unwilling to learn cool looking movie kungfu in which case some of the Batman bits sucking is on him.

The Santa Clause?  I'm so, so sorry.  It could be worse, it could be Santa Claus: The Movie, from 85 with Dudley Moore.

I feel a lot less bad about watching Christmas Vacation and A Christmas Story during the holidays now.

Keaton was a good actor. You can argue whether or not he was right for Batman, but he was already established as a good actor and was often the best performer in whatever movie he was in.

Affleck is a bad actor. He's usually one of the worst actors in whatever movie he's in, and his best roles are mostly as a Boston goon / himself. He's not even good as himself half the time. I mean, he's like the worst actor in Jay and Silent Bob even.

I'm not super angry because it's a Zach Snyder movie so it's going to suck no matter what. But it's an odd choice.

It is a Snyder movie... and a contract for much more (some rumors saying up to 13 movies).  The reports are unconfirmed (AFAIK), but WB is reportedly locking their actors in before the first movie is made so that they don't have any RDJ/Iron Man issues. 

They're building a foundation on moldy Alffuck wood.

Very.   :heartbreak: :cry: :heartbreak: :cry: :heartbreak: :heartbreak: :heartbreak: :cry:

Even if Affleck is good, even if Snyder does good, how many times can you go see these cats before it goes stale?  There's a reason for trilogies.  Tell an epic story then shut it down.  I love RDJ and Iron Man, but it was time for it to end. 

Probably true.  Iron Man 3 and Rises both dissappointed me somewhat.

Plus this is DC, not marvel. So the second string characters are just awful. Also this bubble is already bursting. Marvel will be good to avengers 2. They might eke it out to Avengers 3, but after that they are going to need to go on the back burner for a while.

Without Snyder, without Affleck, even without Superman, this whole concept is a moneypit. The flames will be amusing though.

I've thought that before with various TV shows, comics, movies, games, etc..., and then somebody comes along and takes a series that I thought had spent itself and does something really fucking good with it. Somebody could have come along that could have hit Iron Man 3 or Dark Knight Rises out of the park, but that's not what we ended up getting. Doesn't mean it couldn't have been done right though.

I think the problem with that is that, actually, sometimes the guy doing it are mired in what has come before.  Let's be honest, if Rises hadn't tried stupidly to mash Knightfall and DK Returns together, it would probably have been a much better film.  Same with Iron Man 3 which tried to do Extremis and Armor Wars and kinda ended up with a big pile of Poo.

Doing something 'New' and 'Spectacular' sometimes requires you to leave the source the fuck alone.

That's just my smelly opinion though.

What's interesting is that Avengers did well by respecting the source material with some slight tweaks and updating--not so much a particular storyline, but the classic character bits like "puny god" and so on. Mostly when you see comic-book movies, it's hard to get away from the impression that the director and the studio executives are still kind of embarassed by the source material, that somehow it just won't fly if they don't do something to make it more "realistic" and "mature".

Thing is, "Rises" was probably the least realistic of the Nolan films and whose scope greatly exceeded that of the other two.  IM3 was a bad case of hollywood getting too invested in a property and really felt like a lot of cooks adding spice where it wasn't needed.

Again, I think it was the least realistic precisely because it lost that focus.  It tried to do too much and it came off stupid.  Like, 8 years of nothing, sore leg, broken back, Magic Rope Healing, etc.

Iron Man 3 went further by actually devaluing the Concept of Iron Man.  The more you thought about 'Multiple Drone Suits', the less invested you were in Tony because, Holy Fuck, he did it all very, very stupid if he could do all that.  Drone Better.

You can tell phenomenal stories with characters that have beena aound for thousands of comics. As such, I think it ridiculous to say you can't make 5, 10 or 20 great  movies with the same characters.  What you need is continuity, passion and talent.  We certainly can get thousands of hours of great TV out of a series like Breaking Bad on TV. I believe you could do the same in Movies with the right people in charge.

Scope at the end of Begins or DK was pretty broad. They both were a total destruction of the city thing. DKR hadn't earned it, and didn't thematically make any particular sense in the way both prior films did.

DKR is a weird film in that I thought they did a perfectly good job with batman, bane, Catwoman, Gordon, Robin and even Talia as characters. Just the story makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Although there have been many reports to the contrary, I believe that DKR would have been a vastly different movie had Ledger survivied.  The story the movie tells - Batman coming out of retirement, Gordon retiring, gangs taking over Gotham, etc ... comes right out of the comics version of DKR... and the villian there (for the first half of the story) was the Joker. 

I believe that had Ledger survived, the movie would have had the Joker storyline from DKR woven into a simplified version of the movie. 

None of the Batman movies have done much with recurring villains (with the exception of Scarecrow showing up in all three Nolan films).  Villain-of-the-week probably seems more exciting, especially given that each Batman film incarnation only gets a few movies before it's put out to pasture, but I think it's kind of a waste to set these villains up only to never use them again.

Considering the amazing buzz before his passing from critics and then the awards following his death, I doubt the studio would have allowed Batman 3 to not be able to advertise the %!$# out of having the Joker as the villian.

And, looking forward, they're talking about a 6 picture deal (reportedly) for Cranston as Lex Luthor.  These comics movies are now being looked at as serials with recurring characters locked in... not as a 'monster of the week' deal like we saw in the Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney era.

Keep in mind those deals are structured in that way so they can show up, even for 5 minutes in whatever movie they want/need. So, Cranston having that kind of deal doesn't mean he'll be the big bad in all of the films.

Yeah, these are for a given number of "appearances", not major roles.  Could be anything from a cameo or even a walk-on through a supporting role to effective co-star, it depends on the exact terms.  I don't think Affleck signed up to make 13 Batman movies, rather to be a common character that appears briefly in all or nearly all of the DC movies.

--Dave

There is a lot of speculation into how the Marvel contracts work, but we don't really know the details of those - and have not even had a clue as to what the DC contracts might contain.  There are union rules governing some ways in which those contracts can be written, but there are still a lot of possibilities.

Regardless, the lengths on these contracts has yet to be confirmed, so who the %@$# knows what will happen (other than Affleck being less intimidating the Adam West).

Adam West as the next batman would get me to the theatre.  That is more than I can say for that jobber Affleck.

Here is the pitch: Tim Burton does a movie revival of the Adam West Batman.  It maintains continuity and feel with the series, telling a campy and surreal version of Dark Knight returns featuring Brandon Routh as a Donner Film continuity Superman.  Mandatory low budget to keep the feel right.

That is a Superman/Batman film that I'd be eager to see.

Adam West in Frank Miller's DKR was exactly what I was thinking too.  I also would love to see that.

I think Adam West is even a bit too old for that at this rate.

If he dies while filming, so be it.  That would make excellent footage.

"Sorry...old...chum...can't...go...on."

On this slight derail, by the way, I enthusiastically recommend the comic DC is publishing now that's riffing off of the old Batman TV series. It's great. It might be the only comic that DC is publishing at the moment that is great.

Fan trailer. (http://io9.com/this-fake-batman-superman-trailer-is-so-great-even-batf-1207972184)

Holy slipped disc Batman!

Which just goes to show you trailers can make any pile of crap look good.

Marvel's second stringers being so good is the reason why we're getting a film featuring a space raccoon and a movie dedicated to understanding Hank Pym, a man who builds killer robots and size-shifts, yet still manages to keep "boring" as his main superpower.

Both universes have their fair share of A-listers and dud characters. What's more important is the team behind the film - in the right hands of a writer, director and producer, even characters like Freak the Power Brother could be a must see film.

Which is why I care less about Affleck being Batman than I do about Snyder being director.

Ant-Man is not Hank Pym in the new movie. 

Nor, apparently, does whomever he is build killer robots.

Wait... The ant man movie is indeed Pym. I'm a bit confused

Pym is in Ant-Man, but Ant-Man is the Scott Lang version.

There are a lot of rumors about Ant-man, but it will likely have Pym, Land and Van Dyne... However, the script is as far rom complete as Avengers was when the recently released storyboards were made - you know, the ones with the Wasp, an evil JARVIS, and a cyborg fighting Iron Man in a jungle.

DC's A list consists of Batman, and maybe the Flash. Superman has some excellent PR but remains a terrible character to tell a story about.

Marvel are definitely into overreach but they have far more viable material even without access to spiderman and xmen.

DC does have an 800lb gorilla in the room too. One of their most widely known characters that no one will touch.

Who's that?

Aquaman?

Wonder Woman. Ya, it will be hard to get her right with our modern sensibilities.

Tazelbain beat me to it. Definitely Wonder Woman which is a shame, I've been a fan of her since Linda Carter. Then again, that's probably less to do with the character and more to do with Linda Carter in spandex.

I actually do not get the idea that WW is hard for "modern sensibilities". Ok, so you can't go back to the early comics, since they're all about femdom and lesbian bondage fetishism and a weird variant vision of feminism, and you can't do the 70s cheese version. But you can get WW out of her bathing suit and into something like a stylized and colorful suit of Greek armor (which is not very far from what's been done to other longjohn and spandex costumes) and basically make her a warrior who is also a stranger in a strange land. The only real narrative puzzle is what to do about the Greek gods: I think you have to get rid of them or make them inaccessible to WW and the Amazons, make Paradise Island more like Asgard in the Marvel films--a sort of science/magic hybrid in a pocket dimension that WW is an exile from.

Exactly.  EVERYONE knows wonder woman, comic fan or not, It's definitely a bigger name than iron man was pre-movie. Yet no one wants to go near a wonder woman movie for some reason.

Yeah, it's weird. Maybe it's just Warner Brothers/DC, who really seem to have an aversion to success. I hope somebody there today is holding his head in his hands and weeping softly at the thought that they had Whedon all lined up to make a Wonder Woman movie, for example.

Dark seems to be in right now.  I don't know anything about her origins, is there something dark, brooding and compelling in there?  Something good enough that the campy 70s tv show could be purged from people's memories after watching a trailer?

And that invisible plane nonsense would have to be dropped.

The new 52 Wonder Woman has been really quite dark in some ways, but not in the conventional adolescent style of most of DC's books. Mostly Azzarrello just went back to Greek myth, both about the Amazons and the pantheon and built up from there. So, for example, we found out early on that the Amazons (as in myth) did sometimes abduct sailors to serve as sperm donors, more or less, and that they got rid of any male babies (not by killing them as in myth, but by giving them over to the god Hephesteus to serve as forge workers). He also made a smart change in WW's origin--now she's not a magic parthenogenic baby made from clay but just one more of Zeus' many demi-god children, and the whole "I made you out of clay thing" is a lie that her mom told her that she actually believed for most of her life.  You can also add some grit to WW around the circumstances of her departure from Paradise Island--either she can be an exile who can never go home or Paradise Island is lost to her for some reason, which gives her a link to both Superman and Batman's origins. (Add in Martian Manhunter, Aquaman and Hawkwoman and almost all of the Justice League can be played as orphans cut off from their home cultures and families in some way or another: only GL and Flash are 'normal' guys where there's really nothing in their classic origins to set them up that way.)

The problem is that a modern wonder woman would either be bad karate in stillettos or Xena the warrior princess. Either of which has been done to death and would make everyone puke. Doing her as effectively the She hulk type of empowered woman character seems to be beyond the imagination of holywood. They seem stuck in "Empowered women means they take their clothes off"

but but but....catwoman is empowered... :why_so_serious:

Whedon had a WW take.  I may not have 100% confidence in everything he does, but I'm pretty sure he'd have an empowering and non-exploitative take on the character.  If DC were smart, they'd gravitate in that direction.

Honestly, I don't think it matters.  DC characters don't work for the screen.  The reason is simple.  Pick 10 Marvel characters and 10 DC characters and write an elevator pitch (One or two sentences of about 25 words that summarize the core of the character) about each.  Pick out the key words of each.  Most people will find that the words that describe the majority of the DC character descriptions will focus on WHAT the character is (God/alien/robot, powers, etc...) while the Marvel desciptions will focus more on WHO the character is (motivations and personality (With great power comes great responsibility, FF is about family, mutants ar about persecution, Thor has family issues, etc...)).  The DC penchant fo overpowered characters doesn't help, either.  DC characters are outdated and unrelatable.  The only real excerptions are two of the characters that translate best to the screen - Green Arrow and Batman.  And, if you think about it, those characters would probably fit better in the Marvel Universe than the DC universe.

Honestly a WW period piece could do well. I don't know why they couldn't have an entire movie devoted to ancient culture cause stylistically it always plays out well.  Captain America style so at the end it's modern day but only briefly.

I disagree with what you said. Hell, Green Arrow is a particularly silly character in the comics context - an archer who shoots boxing arrow gloves at people?

And yet, in the hands of a competent writing team, the Green Arrow TV series is both a hit and a decent story. There's nothing particularly outdated or unrelatable about the DC characters other than an insistence on holding on to certain parts of continuity that may or may not work onscreen in the hands of the right creative team. The Green Lantern movie wasn't terrible but it wasn't written very well.

The other thing about batman and green arrow is that they are very nearly the same guy.

As for wonder woman; she'd fit into Lois and Clark just fine. Yet another reason that is the best superman.

Green Arrow dumped the boxing glove arrows (and other gadget arrows) in the 80s with the Longbow Hunters.  LH is the start of the storylines that inspire Arrow.  He may use gadgets on occasion in the comics, but for the most part, AFAIK, he uses real arrows.  Like Batman and the Dark Knight reboot, Green Arrow from the 80s on is a different character than what came before.  From 1987 on, he is a more Marvel character that would fit in comics with Daredevil, Punisher, Captain America, Spider-man, and SHIELD. 

As for the relatability of Superman, WW, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Martian Manhunter, etc... The characters, at their core, are not part of society.  They've above it.  They're Gods amongst mortals.  Aliens with powers thar keep them out of society.   People unbound by the laws of science.  People that travel the cosmos fighting threats that can consume worlds.  How are those relatable?

Yes, Thor the God of Thunder is so much more relatable than a guy raised by humans in Kansas or a test pilot given magic alien wish ring.  :oh_i_see:

EDIT: And just to clarify, relatable is in how you write the damn character, not the character concept itself. Martian Manhunter? Totally get the whole loner trying to find common ground with society at large thing. Hawkman or Green Lantern? Interstellar cops. Flash? Flash has always been a relatable character. Wonder Woman? Woman trying to succeed in a male-dominated society.

But Thor was made relatable precisely because he was human for, well, almost all of his own film and we identified hugely with him because he was Utterly Unable to Relate to Anything.

You know better H.  You do.

See my edit. I was being snarky.

Yeah, it's about how it's approached.  But I do agree that, previously (on Tour of Duty) DC have no idea how to get their heroes relatable.  They've never, ever, ever managed it with Superman for me.  Ever.  Batman is just barely there when we deal with Wayne, I can see Wonder Woman, oddly, being done great, but the rest of it ?  I'm not convinced.

I'm happy to be convinced.  But you won't do it with Green Lantern.  That was silly, silly silly.

It may just be me talking, but given my last name and the fact that i have shitty vision, I connect with Thor far more than I do with Green Lantern.

Classic Hal Jordan creates a problem with being relatable mostly because, 1) he has no fear and that's a pretty big component of his character and 2) he's an absolute dick. Of course, I would say the same thing about Wolverine and yet he's a beloved character (I personally hate him except when Jackman plays him AND he's written well). I always had problems relating to Capt. America because for the longest time, he was the ultimate WhiteBread character, as bad if not worse than Superman.

Tony Stark is a genius billionaire whose only real flaw is alcohoism - I can't relate to that concept at all. And other than his persona being more SOCIAL than Bruce Wayne's, how is he any different at an abstract level than Batman? Batman's flaw is grief, something much more relatable to most people than alcoholism.

DC's characters aren't less relatable, they are just generally VERY BADLY WRITTEN for the screen. The reasons they are so badly written is 1) they cling to too many Silver Age tropes that make no sense these days (test pilots anyone?), 2) WB producers I think tend to believe that comic book super hero movies will do good no matter the quality purely because geeks will buy anything with geek stuff on it. They haven't yet figured out that Nolan's Batman movies or the Marvel movies were so successful because they had top quality writers/producers/actors involved in the project. Geeks didn't make Avengers $1 billion at the box office.

There is no definitive or final version of these characters--Green Arrow goes back and forth in his comics from being a liberal blowhard with woman troubles and trick arrows to being a grittier vigilante and so on (but yeah, always tied in some ways to Batman, which goes back to his beginnings). I'm with Haemish on this--there is no DC or Marvel character that you couldn't do 'right' for a film if you found the right take.

The odds of getting it 'right', though, go down if you insist on doing what Marvel's doing and having a bunch of characters who come together in a single franchise package. That's why that was so gutsy on their part and so impressive that it's worked out pretty well so far.  I don't think you can back into that the way Warner is about to--you gotta have a plan. You could way up the fantastic and weird and superhero-fetish elements in the DC film universe and have it succeed (The Incredibles works fine, for example, with that kind of treatment) but that then has to touch on any character who is in your shared set of films. You can keep characters completely isolated and do fun shit that's very different with each of them.  You can ground it all in a grittier, more 'real' approach but then there are characters who no longer work right or who only work right if you're willing to abandon everything that audiences think they know about them. (You can make Superman work in a 'realistic' mode if you're willing to go where Alan Moore went with Miracleman, for example, where the character almost inevitably becomes a god and dictator whether he wants to or not.) But you have to have a take, a direction, an interpretation and it has to be based on something other than what some studio guy hears in the elevator pitch.

If I had to name DC characters who could work as one-off characters in their own little world, it would probably *not* be the Justice League except for Batman and Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman could work because she carries along with her a potentially interesting mythology that also helps supply some matched-up antagonists and some solid relationships. If I were looking over DC's catalog and not thinking about a Justice League movie, I'd be looking at the weird second-stringers who have a completely self-contained sort of aesthetic, an interesting hook in terms of powers/origins, and don't require a universe full of spandex-clad guys to make sense--the Demon, Hitman, Animal Man, Resurrection Man, etc.  Flash, Green Lantern, Cyborg, Black Canary, all those kinds of people really only are interesting in a setting with other fantastic beings and people in costumes.

You wouldn't think they could cock up Constantine so badly, and yet there it was.  Also, I would reallllly like to see Zatana up there.

(Though I've lost the plot of who's arguing what now and we've drifted so far from Batman and Supes that it's not real.)

Preacher as directed by the Cohen brothers.

I'm awaiting your pitch for a viable Vibe movie.  You know, other than the porn version.  

At the core, relatable means that we can get into the character's skin and feel for them.  Everything that makes up the character is apart of that equation.  The way the character is written plays a huge part, but the history (including the origin) of the character is a huge limitation.  How many people have written Superman stories?  How many of them are relatable to the audience?  The Godlike nature of the character makes it nearly impossible to write stories to which people can relate.  That is why so many of the stories are 'I'm an alien' stories.

I'm not in left field with my observations here.  In fact, they're not really observations.  They're vomit.  I'm just regurgitating things that have been observed a million times before by much more hard-core geeks than me.  DC has failed, and will continue to fail, because their characters, outside a select few, are out of synch.  

As for the Thor observations - I almost brought him up, but decided to wait to see if someone else would.  The vast majority of the Thor stories boil down to family stories.  Thor and Loki.  Thor and Odin.  More are responsibility stories about his duty to Midgard and Asgard.    Thor is the least relatable of the Marvel characters in many ways, but even he is built upon topics that are relatable.  Duty.  Family.  Hots for a nurse.

You can reduce most characters down to that, though. It's really not anything that's exclusive to Thor.

Not sure why they need Batman and Superman to team up except to form the Justice League down the road.  Because, you know, there are threats out there the World's Greatest Detective and the Man of Steel can't solve on their own.  :awesome_for_real:

Why do they HAVE to film the Justice League?  Just because of Marvel's The Avengers? 

Yes.

That is the weirdest set of questions.

Everyone of those things you mention are in the Man of Steel movie. Family is a HUGE part of that movie. Duty to his homeworld and parents vs. duty to his adopted parents and the world he feels at home in. Hots for a nurse - well, ok for a journalist but still. I felt a lot more empathy with the Henry Cavill/Zak Synder Superman than I did with Thor and I liked the Thor movie a lot. I also say this as someone who feels Superman isn't a very interesting character BECAUSE of the god-powers.

One of the charming things in an odd way is that the Justice League wasn't one of these teams built where everyone is a different kind of specialist so you can see why they have to be a team. It's more like a bunch of really successful guys who have a social club and then it turns out that every once in a while there's something too big for any one of them. But it's definitely not what you'd do if you were trying to come up with the conventional "we have a ninja and a strongman and a psychic and a smart guy and a teleporter" teams, which mostly have not actually lasted.

Vibe might be a good example of the kind of character that's so third-rate that you can't really think of a way to do it right conceptually. Or maybe all you'd need is to dial it back and ask, "So what would happen if you were a Latino street kid and you suddenly had weird sonic powers?" That can go comic, it can go semi-serious, you just have to decide which and then get a guy who is actually going to understand the setting and the possibilities. Hell, the Justice League cartoon found a way to make the Wonder Twins, Black Vulcan and Apache Chief into interesting characters; Alan Moore found a twist that made Swamp Thing something way more interesting than just another man-into-monster. There's always something an imaginative person can see in there somewhere, or at least almost always.

Dude, if you're going to compare a nurse to a journalist, then we're just wasting our time here.  You're clearly not being realistic.

She's not wearing much to begin with!  :why_so_serious:

The great part of it was that Wonder Woman was originally a feminist vehicle chock-full of man-hating crypto-lesbian subtext, but it's absolutely impossible to make a movie about her now without setting off the professional feminists, in full "TEAR DOWN THE PATRIARCHY!" dudgeon.

Of course, Xena would probably get the same treatment now, too.

--Dave

I've always thought that DC / WB should just go all in and make "Kingdom Come".


Most superhero movies select key bits of character history and throw out the rest. "X-Men" cut things back to a core idea of good, attractive mutants fighting evil, ugly mutants in a world that fears both types. Where a film doesn't like part of the comic book origin, it gets changed. Like where Bruce Wayne is trained up by Ra's Al Ghul in "Batman Begins".

Yeah, I can see how taking a story which was largely notable for its art, would come across as gibberish to most of the audience, and would have to be butchered so much to fit into a movie length that even fans of the comic wouldn't be happy with it would seem like a good idea.

1. She was at least a not-unproblematic "feminist vehicle" at the start by any standard. Unless your conception of feminism involves tons of bondage and domination.
2. Since nobody has made a movie about her, I think arguing that the "professional feminists" (whatever the fuck that means) would set off in dudgeon is a bit premature to say the least.
3. The feminists (most of them, admittedly, amateurs) that I read or know about who also like comics were perfectly geeked out about the possibility of Whedon making a WW film. Less so some other scripts but not because of feminism, simply because they sucked. Sort of like how nobody wanted James Cameron to make a Spider-Man film when they heard about the working script and Cameron's take on the character. It's true that some comic bloggers who are also feminists don't like Azzarello's take on the character but I see why they don't like it and I think it's a legitimate reaction. Oddly this has not made it "impossible" for the current comic version to go ahead. Perhaps only professional feminists have sufficient dudgeon.

Uhhh.. they only let WW join the Justice League because they needed a secretary. I'm not making that up. When she was dreamed up, it was an era of sexism and close mindedness. You can argue she was feminist for the time in that she was sometimes not the damsel in distress( sometimes), but don't go too far down the rabbit hole. She was far closer to WWII porn than a voice for change.

She was secretary to the Justice Society, not the League. The overall point stands, but just wanted to clarify.

You're thinking of the Justice Society, actually. [ah, I see someone else got to this point first]

Isn't the larger problem with DC vs Marvel centered around the alter-ego question?

DC's players are Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman.  They masquerade as Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne and Diana Carter but those aren't who they are.

Marvel's players are Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark.  Their alter egos are the superheroes.  

One you're dealing with the impact of being a super hero on a human being, flawed or smart or orphaned.  That's relateable, you can see yourself in their shoes.  It's easy to understand the crisis of how the superhero problem impacts their human life, relationships or aspirations.

The other, you're dealing with a super-powered being dealing with the difficulties of being that being. Solving problems and dealing with issues much bigger than anything you or I will ever handle.  It takes a different approach.  You can't try and make them relateable beings because they are not.  It has to be about the bigger problem, how they handle that.

This is a subset of the problem with DC's characters being icons/myths and Marvel's characters being people, flaws and all.

Green Arrow is actually a lovely case of this. So on the surface he and Hawkeye are the same, right down to going back and forth between being guys who use boxing glove arrows and other gimmicks and guys who are just good fighters who also shoot sharp pointy arrows into the flesh of gangsters.

But who is Green Arrow as a person? He starts as a Bruce Wayne clone without the parental trauma--basically they graft Robinson Crusoe into Bruce Wayne. Then who is he? He's a guy who loses his fortune and goes "Easy Rider". Then he gets the fortune back. Then he loses it again. Then he gets it back. He's a liberal crusader. He's grim. Then he's funny. Then he's dead. Then he's not dead. He's got a long-time girlfriend, but then he's a rake who hits on all sorts of women. He's got a sidekick! Then he neglects the sidekick and he takes heroin. Then he's got another sidekick. And so on. The person in the middle of that is mostly a cipher who is anchored by his power set, his costume, and a bit of his history.

Hawkeye seems equally mutable if you look at his costumes and even his power shifts (since for a while he was Goliath) but actually the person at the heart of it--angry orphan who has had brushes with the law and has some unsavory guys in his background, guy who wants to be a leader but who also often acts impulsively or foolishly, guy who has a problem with authority figures and is unlucky in love--that's all pretty consistent, whether or not he's Goliath or he's a trick archer with gimmick arrows or he's a redesigned not-trick archer who looks like the character from the film.

A DC film either has to jack up the mythic and legendary, which maybe only works for Batman because he's the only myth they have left that anybody really likes or responds to, or it has to settle on the person and make him interesting. Which so far mostly DC films have not at all managed to do. In a lot of cases I'm not sure they can--if I was starting from scratch, the person I would give the most powerful weapon in the universe to if I wanted to write interesting stories would not be Hal Jordan, Kyle Rayner, Guy Gardner or any of those guys. None of them are interesting people, really, and so all you have left is the legendary/mythic story of the most powerful weapon in the universe and the most cosmic police force that doles it out. Which is assuredly not the Green Lantern film that got made.

If you want some Devils advocacy on the wonder woman thing, you could bring up how Sue Storm of the fantastic 4 was when she was first conceived. She wasn't just a life support system for a pair of tits like she was in the 2 movies, she was EVEN MORE STUPID. She was so stupid that they had kids writing in complaining about how utterly stupid it was that this dingbat was being being let near a set of pliers, let alone dangerous villains. Of course they gave her a totally non threataning superpower at first, which made her even more useless. Go feminism.

(http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/7/8/1/178781.jpg?v=1)

For more Sue Storm stupidity, check  out http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-beloved-superheroes-who-are-actually-really-stupid/

That's a little unfair given that the FF is kind of a dysfunctional family. (Just a little, mind you) In the old comics Sue was always crying about everything and felt left out, Ben was always grousing about his situation, Reed was kind of an ass.

But they "fixed" her over time anyway. The problem with WW is that in terms of Justice League she's just a weak Superman and in terms of her own thing she has no civilian identity. She's just Wonder Woman, some magical Amazon heroine, so it always seems stupid when she pretends to be a normal person and does normal person things.

There was that TV pilot where she was like an ad exec or something - it was laughably bad. Why would Wonder Woman dress up in a power suit and give a powerpoint presentation?

Wonder Woman
She's born in an island full of wimin.
She's made out of clay.
And went to a 'Man's world'
When she is bound by a man, she loses her power.
Conveniently, her lasso of truth can be used on her.

I'm a fan.  :awesome_for_real:

Wonder Woman was originally conceived by a psychologist (with input from his wife IIRC) who wanted to create a strong feminine role model that would make girls proud of being girls, and show that they didn't need to emulate men in order to be considered strong.  By modern standards Wonder Woman would be considered antifeminist because of her obvious sex appeal, but she was definitely intended to be a feminist role model rather than wank material.

That's what Power Girl is for!

Just like people, what happens after conception is far more important to characters than what the plan was at conception.  She was PG porn for the era, with nothing to contribute but legs and female subservience.  Regardless, what she was in the 40s is pretty irrelevant at this point.  What she is now is more important, and that is still PG porn.  To quote Jessica Rabbit...

You're leaving a few things about Marston, though. The stuff about submission (including the erotic side of it) was an integral part of his conception of the character and he thought that the character was as important for boys as girls as it might teach them to submit to strong women, which he thought was key for creating a more civilized and peaceful world.

(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/14/article-0-1BCF6AAF000005DC-369_634x631.jpg)

Go ahead you fucks.  Go ahead and try to defend this move. :-)

(Note that fucks, in this context, is a term of endearment...)

I'm going with "Bieber trolls theinterwebz" until an announcement from WB rather than the Instagram site of a guy who knows how much the web hates him.

photoshopped cause beiber has a douchy new moustache now and obviously shopped.

Indeed.   I mean, holy christ, what is he doing that puts him so close to the bathroom floor that the toilet paper roll is ABOVE his head....

Confirmed it came from Bieber, but likely still a prank. 

I want to live in a world where Bieber gets cast as the Boy Wonder, and earns an Oscar for his timeless portrayal of the tragic, youthful ward.  The whole internet will be like "damn, I didn't know Bieber had it in him."

Because that would be hysterical.  I hate Bieber, but I would love that for some reason.

I want to live in a world where Bieber gets cast off a boat and a giant whale eats him.  Millions of teenage girls mourn him for 38 seconds until their ADHD turns them to the next Bieber clone and by 2016 Bieber is nothing more than a trivia question that most people can't answer.

Best guess: This is going to be a Funny or Die thing. 

Yeah, based on the follow-up it's a FoD thing. 

Just remember, people were all about Brittney Spears, 98 degrees, N'Sync, Backstreet Boys, and NKOTB before too.  Bieber, too, shall pass.

I want to live in a world where Bieber gets cast as the Jason Todd Robin and they decide to adapt "Death in the Family" for the first five minutes of the film.

Here's what's funny about that, to my mind;  I had heard all those chaps sing and perform and whatnot, but I've heard a metric fuckton about Bieber (none of it good) and I've yet to witness the horror that is him doing anything.

Lucky escape there then.

I want to live in a world where someone remakes Oz as a gay S&M porno and Bieber plays the new inmate.

Getting a little Freudian in here.

That's what she said.

Uhhhh... have you taken a careful look at your avatar? 

Someone decided to make a fan-made follow up for the Nolanverse. For a fan film, looks solid.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dark-knight-legacy-the-ultimate-batman-fan-series/x/3706252

I don't know - he's kinda responsible for one of the coolest bits of the Dredd 3D soundtrack.

No, really!

Really ?  Was it in the film ?  Cause I've seen that 3 times.

Ah well.

Yep.

This (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M) became this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNAxw8PuKi4&list=PLF6tW055Hhxf6aEcVRfATH73OXY65hlQD).

Dredd was a surprisingly excellent movie.

It's happened before; see DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can.

Not sure what you mean?  I don't remember a time when I didn't think DiCaprio was a really good actor.

I can!  Right now!  His performances might be better, but he still ruins scenes for me.  I like some movies in spite of him though.

Right after Titanic he was incredibly unpopular, particularly among young males.

I found him pretty annoying before titantic, after titantic, pretty much all the way up to The Departed. It was probably the jobs he took more than his ability as an actor.

Yeah, I am not saying by any stretch that I love all of his movies.  Not even close.  But I do think he is easily one of the better actors in Hollywood. 

I agree now. But until Gangs of New York and Catch Me If You Can, he was like Beiber: adored by teen girls and loathed by young males.

ALthough I think he has been in some good films, I have never thought he was good in them.  However, I have not seen Gangs of New York.  Regardless, I don't think he'll be in Slaughterman vs Butfleck.

Turn your fanboy down a bit, it's waking up the baby.

Hopefully I will never lose my ability to be gently amused by nerds who argue that someone else being too much of a nerd.

I will zealously defend my right and obligation to call people out on their inane wordplay when it comes to things they dislike.

When do we do that, Lake of Sanitation?

 :facepalm:

Hey, you poked the bear.

Wonder woman cast.

http://www.blastr.com/2013-12-4/its-official-batman-vs-superman-has-found-its-wonder-woman (http://www.blastr.com/2013-12-4/its-official-batman-vs-superman-has-found-its-wonder-woman)

She strikes me as too fraile looking for the role.  I was assuming they'd go with someone more athletic and less 'model'-ish. 

Your assumptions are based on no hollywood reality I know.  Athletic to them is this, anything else just makes you some sort of monstrous bulldyke not fit for the silver screen.

There is a spectrum amongst young actresses. Some of the most popular are more athletically built than this girl. I was not expecting Lisa Lobo, but someone with a toned musculature and non fragile frame would be a better physical match.

I'm assuming she'll do a lot of physical training for this role. While I doubt she'll end up looking like Linda Hamilton in T2 I would expect her to look less scrawny than she does right now by the time principal filming starts.

It's a Snyder movie. She'll look exactly like she does now if Sucker Punch is any indication.

Exactly. "Girls kick ass!"  (as long as they are only fit for modelling.)

Zach Synder is about a million miles down the list of people that I think could get Wonder Woman--or any female protagonist--right.

Hey, I'd put him a step above Michael Bay.

Speaking as Joe Q. Public (someone who was never into the comic book scene), the first thing you expect from Wonder Woman is that she is stupidly, ridiculously good looking.  I cannot think of an incarnation of WW that I have ever seen - including very limited comic book exposure, the old TV show, the Saturday morning cartoons, and even as she appeared in the DC Universe trailers - where she wasn't just soul crushingly gorgeous.  That she is also a bit voluptuous at the same time is also sort of expected, though that can be helped to a degree by the costume itself...but certainly not as rail thin as this chick appears to be.  There is a very short list of current actresses or celebrities that currently fit or could be made to fit this ideal.  Even if you beef up this Gal Gardot (or whatever her name is) up a bit, she isn't a match.

Short list of humans who, IMO, could be WW:

Scarlett Johansson - Obviously it can never happen, but she is probably the closest thing to a perfect match if you make her hair raven black.
Megan Fox - I know she is annoying as all fucking hell, but I think we all remember a scene or two from the Transformers movies where we forgot to breath for a couple seconds.  She would need more meat on her bones, and I imagine a bit of kung fu training.
That slightly chubby girl that has a TV show currently - Can't remember her name at all.  She would need to lose weight, but fuck me if she couldn't be cleaned up something nice.  Wish I could recall her name.  Somebody here knows who I am talking about.  I think she was even mentioned before as a candidate.
Katy Perry - don't laugh, think about it.  She cleans up disturbingly well.  She looks exactly like Wonder Woman, and it didn't occur to me until just right now.

And that's all I can think of.

Katy Perry wouldn't do it. She would have to wear a totally different brand of makeup and look more like herself to do it, and her entire career is built on not looking like herself at all. I agree that she would be really good though.

WW always struck me as a Diana Rigg type, personally. Pity there are pretty much zero actresses out there with that kind of class and beauty these days.

Wanked Pic.

I do not agree that Wonder Woman has to be 'Drop Dead Gorgeous'.  Indeed, I think that's a dangerous trap to fall into.

Take Megan Fox and Katy Perry to fuck.

What I mean by that is that's what I think the average schlub expects.  There is a certain mold that has been created for her, like it or not, and people will be dis-inclined to find something outside of that mold as credible.  Why not have a blond, slightly chubby Superman?  Kinda the same thing.  Supes has to have black hair, a muscular build, preferably blue eyes, a square jaw and absolutely must wear his underwear on the outside of his clothes.  You have to be extremely careful about re-inventing these brands.

Aye, I had a pic there which caused argument about what's pretty enough or not for Wonder Woman amongst my retarded friends, but it got wanked.

Basically, I really, really want to get away from the Lynda Carter look because I'd really, really rather than Wonder Woman looked like someone who could beat the utter fuckery out of you without worrying about breaking a nail.

Don't get me wrong, Lynda Carter was, and is, awesome, but if we're reinventing, why not do it right ?  Why not follow a Batman mould that WORKS ?

I dunno.  In my head, she isn't WW if she isn't also a stunner.

Angelina Jolie of 10 years ago might have also worked.

I would much rather a WW who looked like a warrior than a model. It's time for that, and there have been some feints and moves here and there in the comics in that direction.

Personally, I think they should have gone with someone Mediterranean looking rather than northern European. And as for the TV actress Cyrrex mentioned, I just do not see Melissa McCarthy as Wonder Woman. (Did you really mean Zoey Deschanel?)

Why on earth would you want wonder woman looking like some swarthy Mediterranean?  :oh_i_see:

So sick of this Waif-Fu Bullshit.

Oh ye of little faith and over reliance on stereotypes...

http://www.listal.com/list/beautiful-greek-actresses (http://www.listal.com/list/beautiful-greek-actresses)

This. I don't know enough about this women to care much, but my first thought when I saw a picture of her was "DAMN SHE IS THIN. RAIL THIN. EAT A DAMN SAMMICH THIN."

Not saying she couldn't pull it off, but not what I think of for Wonder Woman. Lucy Lawless at the height of Xena is pretty much my ideal actress to play Wonder Woman.

You know, I was going to say that, but I thought I'd be opening myself up to a pile on.

Pretty much.  If your woman is meant to be a fucking Amazon and the pinnacle of warrior women everywhere, Xena would be somewhere to START.

This is a film in which Ben Affleck plays Batman, eyes on the prize people, Wonder Woman being too skinny is not even in the top 3 things wrong with this film.

I have no problem with Affleck as Bats. I initially laughed because it was so left field, but he'll be fine. He won't be anywhere near the problem with this flick if it turns out to be shit.

I still like the old idea of Gina Torres as WW.

O ye of little irony.

I didn't like Xena TWP show, but even I have to admit that a Lucy Lawless type would be the ideal way to go for WW.  At least Xena looked like she would pick up a sword without passing out. The actress they have now looks like she would have difficulty lifting WW's bracelets.

Waif-Fu be dammed. It was shit even when they had monsters throwing themselves backwards pretending to be hit hard from Buffy, and she was a bodybuilder compared to this woman.

How tall is this lady?

That's what is going to be really jarring for me, if she turns out to be 5 foot nothing standing beside Batman and Superman.

5' 9" (175 cm)

Cavill is 6'1" and Afflec is 6'4"

Even at 5'9" she's gonna look tiny.

Is Afflec really that tall? Damn, wouldn't have guessed that.

She's not an actress and she is short, but I think Jillian Michaels could credibly play Wonder Woman. She has the physique and the attitude of an amazon woman.

One of the best places to see his size is movies like Chasing Amy and Goodwill Hunting. He towers over everyone.

But the height thing doesnt bother me, they can do all sorts of camera tricks. It's more or less that her build is... tiny.

Why do you guys keep saying Waif-Fu? The term is waifu, and it doesn't mean waif, it means wife.

Cyrrex - you totally mean Kat Dennings, right? From Two Broke Girls?  Because I totally agree.

(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRFJ3UTyE0d5oCFeWSzS6qQrypNWyGxCluGb4xufKx2-oULkCHD)

Goodness gracious yes.  Thanks.

Waif + Fu (as in Kung).  Waif fighting girls.

Except that if she was wonderwoman, practically 90% of the audience would mentally have to suppress the constant urge to wonder why Thor does not have a cameo appearance in the movie.

Huh?  Was she the nerdy girl in Thor?  If so, I totally never noticed that.

Seriously ?

Is it because she wore a coat all the time ?

Well, probably, yeah. I wanna say she was wearing some kind of hat, too.

She was.

I feel for the lassie, I think most people just remember the paps.

She has an impressive set to be sure, but that isn't the the part of her that does it for me. Those eyes kill me, and don't even get me started on the lips.

Then I shall not.

Don't feel bad. I didn't make the connection until schpain mentioned it (and Ironwood's explanation is about right). I blame biology and genetics and shit.

She got kind of dressed down so she wouldn't risk coming across as the sexy one over Portman.

Really, there are only three reasons to cast her as Wonder Woman (including hair color).  She has never shown the right acting chops for such a role, and her facial features are all wrong.  Regardless, I still maintain they should have gone for a quality actress from Greece (or elsewhere in the Mediterranean) even if she was not a known name in the US.

I have no idea who that is but I would also like to thank you.

I haven't seen the woman cast as Wonder Woman in anything, and have read that she was a fitness instructor in the Israeli Military, but she lacks the build. Wonder Woman needs to be able to eyeball Superman and look like she can take him down (which she can).

It makes Megan Gale - who was almost Wonder Woman in the JLA film - a great choice by comparison.

But we'll see.

Thread seems to have degenerated into complaining about Hollywood casting on the basis of looks as demonstrated by hiring an actress who the f13 community deem innappropriate because of her looks.

Irony is delicious.

There's no irony there.

If someone isn't right for the role because she doesn't 'fit', that's not really complaining about her 'looks'.  That's saying that we can't quite see her as this character we've lived with.

Hollywood, of course, sees things different, which is entirely up for grabs to complain about, since they have an ideal that appeals and you KNOW they have an ideal that appeals, so even arguing with it is pointless.

It's not her looks.  Wonder Woman Should be Beautiful.  It's the standard of that beauty that I'm kind of objecting to.  I just don't 'see' it yet.  Maybe I'll be wrong.  Who knows.  Maybe she'll bulk up, fill out, have a distracting costume, play it perfectly, whatever.

But right now I really, really don't see it because above all I want to have some willing suspension of disbelief that will draw me into the film.  Look at all the Avengers cast.  They all worked because actually, at the heart of it, all of them looked like the comic counterparts, even Black Widow.  The worst one was Renner, but since no-one gives a shit about Hawkeye, who cares ?

But Wonder Woman has a very, very, very iconic look and getting that right is important.  Superman is just a badge.  Batman is just a cowl.  They've both proved any arsehole can do it.  Wonder Woman needs a little more care, I think.

And I don't see The Stick working for me.

Delighted to be wrong.  People said the same thing about Ledger.  Look how THAT turned out.

Given that they hired someone most people never heard of, and the title doesn't have wonder woman in it, my guess is none of this will matter as it will end up being a 3 line cameo that gets recast twice before we see a Justice League film.

Not looks - physicality.  She does not have the physical body to be Wonder Woman.  If they were making a movie about the life of Andre the Giant and cast Peter Dinklage in the role, it'd be ridiculous.  It would not be bad because Dinklage is a bad actor, or because he can't portay the actions and reactions of Andre, but because his physicality does not match the role.  A thin frame is not suitable for an Amazon Princess.  Gal's frame is more appropriate for other characters.

I just don't see us ever believeing that her frame could stop a truck.

And we're now hearing that we have Superman, Batman, Nightwing, Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor and Doomsday in this thing?  And, apparently, there is discussion of what it would take to meld this movie continuity with the Arrow TV show continuity (setting Man of Steel at the current Arrow season).

God I hope not.  Arrow is too good for the DC cinematic universe to fuck it up.

Pushed back to May 2016.

And I expect we'll get an announcement soon that Justice League hits summer 2017...

Wonder Woman is 6' tall and is able to beat up anybody short of Superman without breaking a sweat. I think you'd have trouble finding an actress that tall and that built who could actually act though two that come to mind for me are Tricia Helfer and Gina Carano.

(http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjQ5NjMxOTU5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODY4NzQyNw@@._V1_SX640_SY720_.jpg)

Gina is only a so-so actress. I quite enjoyed her in Haywire but it played to her strengths. (brutal fight scenes!)

However, she has the right build and looks tough. Unfortunately she is only 5'8". Tricia Helfer is 5'10 1/2 and is a better actress but she'd have to add some muscle.

And Martin Freeman is far too tall to play Bilbo.

Computers man. Computers  :grin:

If computers can make that waif with the toothpick arms look like Wonder Woman, then they might as well just CGI her whole role.

--Dave

Who, Riggswolfe's choice? Looks fine for the part to me. It's not like the movie goer is going to notice if she's 4" too short for the role. That's so within the margin of error of what a computer could correct (again, see: Bilbo) that it wouldn't even be heavy lifting. And really, it's not like I needed to dig deep for Freeman. They've been making Arnold Schwarzenegger look tall for 30 years.

Also, let's keep this in perspective. We're talking Wonder Woman here. If they can change Superman three times in one generation and have a short kinda scrawny Batman in a trilogy of largely enjoyable and financially successful enough movies, they can kinda do whatever the heck they want with a character that hasn't had any screen time since before Buck Rogers era TV. They're only going to piss off a rounding error's worth of movie ticket buyers no matter what they do.

I remember people saying Heath Ledger was all wrong for the Joker.  How did that turn out? :awesome_for_real:  Its one of the reasons why I don't take comic book nerds very seriously when they bitch about casting choices.

There is a difference between:

* We don't think Actor X can pull it off, and
* We don't think Actor X has the right look for the part.

For the most part, I don't care about race, frame, or even gender for a role.  If you wanted to remake TJ Hooker with a 380 lb Hispanic female in Shatner's role - bring it on.  I'm open minded.  I had no problem with Joan Watson on Elementary and
However, if there are physical aspects to the role that are central to the core of the character, you can't brush them aside.  I'm closed off t those types of changes.  Wonder Woman must be a woman.  Further, she needs to be an Amazon.  She needs to look like a truck hitting her is going to bend around her, not like she'll bend around a feather that falls on her.

And before someone says something about the acting being more important - there are many actresses with the right look that can also act the socks off the role.  It doesn't need to be one or the other... but Hollywood is so desperate to get Megan Foxes in almost every role to sell sex, they sacrifice both the right physicality and the right acting to get their sex.

A LOT of the Ledger bullshit was based squarely on Brokeback Mountain and stupid homophobic BS.

But yes, there is a GULF of difference between this situation and Ledger as Joker.

Also, while there was a lot of ledger bullshit, it wasn't on forums like this. Here on f13, one regular poster had an issue with it, and he got over it in about 24 hours.

Nothing abo,,ut this film is like the dark knight.

Yarp.

So much this.   It took me all of 10 seconds to get over Kingpin in Daredevil being a big mean black man, instead of a big mean white man.   Now try to picture Kevin Heart being the kingpin.   It's practically impossible.

Eh. A better analogy would be a terrible SKINNY comedic actor.

Steve Buscemi as The Kingpin?  He's not a terrible actor, but there's just no way.

--Dave

Quite.  And as I remember it most of the outrage over Ledger was also due to the Glasgow Grin.

The outrage stuff we are talking about was during casting, long before we knew what he would look like.

People also overstate the resistance on that for some reason.  The vast majority approached it more questioningly than objectingly.

How to fix superman vs batman.

1. Stop calling it superman vs batman
2. Stop casting justice league
3. 1 villain per hero. No minor villains.

Chances that they'll take any of this advice? 0%

In the end, I think they're screwed regardless of their approach.

DC characters just don't work on screen.  They're 'bigger than life', and when you have the Flash, Green Lantern, Shazam, and Superman in live action, their powers look ridiculous.  Most of them are artifacts that were conevied of in an era that is ridiculously out of place in modern sensibilities.

If I were DC, I'd stick to the animated movies and TV series and leave the live action to Marvel - their characters work better on film.

That's a great point and I tend to agree BUT surely they could find someone who could update these iconic heroes to a modern sensibility.  Sadly, I don't think anyone at WB has 'The Vision' Marvel has to make these heroes relateable and cool.

It strikes me as they don't really have an overall plan like Marvel does and they are foundering.  Marvel is digging down deep in their gold mine while DC is smacking at the creek water with their gold pan.

Marvel(or disney in the case of the movies) didn't have much of a plan before Iron man either, really.  They needed a comic book hero that wasn't spiderman or the fantastic four and let's be honest way back in the day the argument was "will people even know who iron man is?"

DC had the same opportunity with batman begins and dark knight and they tried, god bless em.  They released a terrible green lantern movie and a superman darker than anyone was comfortable with.  They had all the same chances as marvel to build up a justice league movie on par with avengers but they've squandered that.

Well, DC is doing pretty good with Arrow and I believe they plan on doing Flash after this season of Arrow ends (since they've introduced and origin'd him). I'm not sure if those characters are slated to appear in a future JL movie, but Arrow is the first DC thing other than Nolan's Batman trilogy that I've enjoyed.

Right, but we weren't talking about them. We were talking about the people openly bitching.

Marvel actually was in a worse position before the success of Iron Man because of how many different companies they had sold licenses to. Spider-Man is at Sony, Fox has the X-Men line so they couldn't (and still can't) control all their brands cohesively. DC, OTOH, was all owned by Warner Bros. and could have pulled all their properties into one universe/one brand and made a killing. Hell, they even have the more iconic characters - Superman and Batman have been around for more than 75 years and were infinitely more recognizable than Iron Man. The problem was they didn't (and don't) have executives who think about it that way. They were thinking about 1 franchise, not 1 universe of multiple franchises. They are still floundering with it. They need a guy like Avi Arad or Kevin Feige, an executive who understands the properties as individuals and as a whole.

Good luck with that.

I'm not sure you can have that vision, as it is inherently inconsistent.  The majority of main DC heroes are defined by the insane power levels.  If you depower them enough to make them fit with a modern relatable sensibility, they stop being the characters we know.  There are obvious exceptions, but when it comes to Supes, Shazam, Flash, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern(s), Spectre, Dr. Fate, etc... there are too many massively powerful characters to accept.

Yes, Marvel has a few of these issues.  Swallowing GotG, Thor and Dr. Strange is quite a bit different than accepting Hulk, Iron Man and Ant-man.  However, it is not on the same scale - and Marvel barely made Thor work in the eyes of most people.  GotG and Dr. Strange have yet to be pulled off.

To my mind Thor is the most impressive film of the lot, allowing for the quality of the material they had to work with.

Answering Haemish's point, while I'm all in favour of piling on DC, they don't really have more recognisable characters beyond superman and batman. Superman is a terrible premise in the first place and neither plays well with others.

The idea of trying to make Batman and Superman grind through the back and forth banter of a buddy movie fills me with dread even before you get Zac Snyder and Ben Affleck involved.

Sometimes the sum of the parts really is worth more than the whole.

Even the avengers is far from certain to work out ok twice.

The fact that Bats and Sups don't play well together or anyone else is largely the premise of all of their teamup stuff as well as JL. The title has been Superman vs Batman, not BUDDY ACTION THEATER.

Zac Snyder is the thing to worry about most, especially if there are female characters involved.

The answer is simple: these characters "don't work" until someone comes along who can make them work. There is no character in DC or Marvel's canon who could categorically cannot be in a film and be enjoyed by mainstream audiences. Every character is locked up until a screenwriter, director and actors comes along with a key.

This includes characters with "insane power levels", characters in a world full of superheroes, and so on.  There have already BEEN movies enjoyed by mainstream audiences where there are or have been lots of superpowered people with complex relationships. The Incredibles is the best example.

It's stupid to make dictates or rule things out. Geeks are fond of ruling things out as impossible and then quickly forgetting that they said so once it happens.

However, if you're going to use an existing character, you have to both get the character right--in that they have some specific spirit or nature that distinguishes them that is the reason for working with them--and you have to be willing to shuck off anything that doesn't work, to reshape and modernize the character.

If you're working with a character who is inherently referential--e.g., requires a universe full of superheroes who they contrast against or relate to--you have to not make them the first property you're working with or not try to shoehorn in everything else. You have to do it the way The Incredibles did--quick strokes that establish the genre and setting, then get to work on your main guy.

If you're working with an iconic character who can potentially stand alone, strip them down to the essential idea and build it back again.

If you want more than one character, though? Then you've got to start making a world where that makes sense. You can't make Lord of the Rings and have elves and dwarves meet for the first time--it has to be a world where elves and dwarves have been there for thousands of years. If you're going to have a Justice League, you need to have an idea about why suddenly there are seven people who wear costumes and fight bad guys.

I agree with everything you said.

There is no physical reason why DC can't make one shared universe for its superhero movies. Or feature other heroes besides batman and superman. Or create a justice league movie.

The problem here is that folks with the money are far too old to do anything with the license except mimic what the marketing executives feed them through IV.

At this point I don't even want to see them attempt to tie the entirety of DC into one filming franchise.I think their better off with a more oceans 11 approach to justice league than a "Look see? Remember that guy in the blue suit you saw 2 movies ago? He's back but with more superfriends who may or may not have gotten their own movies." They don't know what to do with what they have so their flaundering on executive orders to make the marvel hat dollars.

Which requires talent and vision on the executive level not just in the directors chair.

If you'd rather characterize the situation by saying it is far, far, far more difficult to make a live action DC film with the larger than life heroes than it is to makie movies about the more grounded Marvel heroes, I think that is fair.  

I just think it is hard to a degree that exceeds a reasonable expectation for what a studio can produce.  I thought the Superman movie they made was pretty darn good for a Superman movie - but it was not great overall.

On a different note: Stephen Arnell has confirmed to Fandango that his Green Arrow could make the leap to a Justice League movie and establish that his Greeb Arrow and the new Flash are part of the movie continuity...

http://www.fandango.com/movieblog/bam-pow-zap-talking-superhero-rumors-with-steven-amell-jason-momoa-and-sam-l-jackson-746510.html (http://www.fandango.com/movieblog/bam-pow-zap-talking-superhero-rumors-with-steven-amell-jason-momoa-and-sam-l-jackson-746510.html)

I don't disagree it is possible in the way Khaldun suggests.

I just don't see why you'd want to, seems to be an awful waste of creative effort, and don't agree there is any automatic premium on putting these characters in the same film.

Arrow is the best thing DC has done since Bats 2.  They should get the show runners to come up with a comprehensive plan for the JL heroes. Also, no hero origins, here's an example.

Superman:  "So Batman right?  What's your story?"
Batman:  "None of your business."

Done.

They need to let Bruce Timm and Paul Dini direct :P

Bruce Timm directing this with complete god like authority would be the only thing saving this crap wheel that's on fire.

Part of the problem is that most of the executives green-lighting superhero movies, and even some of the directors, are actually kind of embarrassed by superheroes and comic-books. That can work if you're trying to work with a grittier 'real-life' vigilante pulp character like Batman. It can't work if you're dealing with a four-color spandex guy who has superpowers. It just can't. You can't be embarrassed by the gaudy unreality of a guy who could move the Moon from its orbit flying around saving cats from trees and stopping muggers and still green-light the movie.

You have to actually love the idea of a world full of men and women who wear their underwear on the outside doing mighty deeds and stoping evil-doers. That's why The Incredibles worked--it had not even one ounce of chagrin about a super-hero world. It's ultimately why The Avengers worked--it's more "real world" than The Incredibles, but Whedon basically loves the core tropes of superhero team-up books and reworks them beautifully. He's not in the least ashamed of them.

Watchmen--the book at least--was the final word on what you have to do with superheroes if you're embarrassed by them: you have to recognize that in a world like our world, a guy who dressed up in form-fitting spandex and beat up criminals would be a sex fetishist or a mental case of one kind or another, and a person with genuine super-powers would change literally everything about geopolitics and society.

The problem so far with the Superman lead-in to a Justice League film is that it's ashamed of the character and the genre. "Man of Steel" tried so hard to show that it's "grown-up" and in the process just killed all the fun out of it. They narrowcast their sense of being "grown up" at the kind of post-adolescent who got an erection looking at Rob Liefield illustrations of Cable carrying an even bigger gun and wearing even bigger pouches. If they don't fix that basic issue, none of the rest of it is going to be even a teeny bit fun or right.

Absolutely Agree with the problem you see, but still disagree that there is a solution with mass appeal for a wide audience.   

I felt the same about Thor.  True, it may not look like comic book Martian Manhunter, etc. but it can be done.

Khaldun's point was not that it couldn't work.

It can totally work. The guys making it and the suits funding it just have to not be secretly ashamed of the whole genre.

I sort of agree, but then I think about characters like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern.

Green Lantern's ability is that if someone shoots a round bomb at him he creates a green ping pong paddle and hits it back at them. His weakness is the color yellow. To me this says comedy film, or at least a film with a humorous side. He's a little goofy, even for a movie like Avengers. His super power is being ridiculous.

I get that you can not make his weakness yellow and make him create magical machine guns instead of ping pong paddles, but then it's not really the classic Green Lantern any more. He's then just a guy who can create anything.

And then there is Wonder Woman. She is basically just a weak Superman who is female. Also she has an invisible plane and lasso of truth. She's pretty fundamentally ridiculous, but also boring. I struggle to think of anything interesting about her beyond the fact that she's female. She's like Paris Hilton - Paris Hilton is famous just for being Paris Hilton. Wonder Woman is well-known because she is Wonder Woman, but her character brings very little to the table.

With a character like Spider-Man you have fundamental stuff to draw on. He has some fun powers, the whole "with great responsibility" thing, he's a teenage with typical teenage problems. His origin has been retold a few times but those fundamentals are mostly fixed.

Wonder Woman (and Green Lantern) are much less consistent. Wonder Woman is an Amazon, she's made out of clay, she's the daughter of Zeus. She's a peacenik, she's a feminist...there's not much through-line to her character, in the end she's just got a recognizable costume.

That's why a movie comes along that explains how she got the invisible plane, the lasso and her strength.  Again, they did it with Thor, they can do it with WW.  Maybe it's not an invisible plane, maybe it's a stealth jet.  Audiences (barely) bought a carrier that flies thru the air and turns invisible, they'll buy a single plane.  Maybe the lasso isn't magical, maybe it's Amazonian tech.  "Hey we got this guy tied up with a carbon-fiber lasso, might as well program it to make him tell the truth."

Marvel knew Thor was a tough sell because he's a god of Asgard.  Instead they made it so that Asgard is just technologically advanced and the primitive humans considered them gods.   It worked.

Does WW even have an invisible plane in the comics? She flies last time I read a WW comic so I don't see the point of even including it.

There are many versions of all of these characters in the comics. DC reinvents them all the time. If you go back to the 50s, 60s and 70s comics, the Batman shown in that era, he hasmore in common with the modern Riddler than the modern Batman.

I disagree with what you said. Vehemently. For all its attempt at a grittier Superman who kills when necessary, I thought it got the character just right for a modern-day audience. I don't think it tried hard to show that it was grown up - I just thought it tried to inject some actual drama and character growth into what is a very static iconic character.

Actually, the original Green Lantern's weakness was wood, not the color yellow.  And Wonder Woman originally was just as strong as the original Superman (Superman became stronger and more ridiculous over time), and she also had telepathy, ESP, astral projection and a bondage theme both with the lasso and with her propensity for ending up tied up or shackled herself.  The invisible plane didn't come until later.

By the way William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, is quite a character himself.  He's the inventor of the lie detector and lived in a polygamous relationship with two women.

Nothing wrong with a strong woman who likes being tied up.

Not very strong, then, is she?

Don't make me get into BDSM psychology....

Please do, that sounds like fascinating discussion.

I like the idea of the polygraph being invented by a polymath polygamist, and resolve never to look it up so as to avoid disappointment.

I choose to imagine the original prototype being made entirely out of polyester.

This. As others have said, they can make it work if they take it seriously. The audience will follow along. That includes the neckbeards who invariably only like one specific depiction of that character, and probably the one few others know about.

There's a different between loving a character and being open minded enough to love the brand (which requires understanding the difference  :awesome_for_real:)


And this. A slightly optimistic/niave Superman who still steps up and does the right thing. But without Richard Pryor or one dimensional cookie cutout boy from the last reinvention. They did well.

Green Lantern is an interesting case. If you strip away dumb shit like "his weakness is wood/yellow" and say, "This is a story about space cops who have magic rings that can do almost anything" and ask the question, "What keeps someone with a magic ring from being bad?" and "if the magic ring is only limited by your imagination, but when you first get it your imagination is kind of limited" those two things might make for an interesting story when you put them together. (E.g., on question 1: why isn't everyone Sinestro? and on the second, "what gives you enough imagination to actually use a ring like that?")

It's all a matter of thinking of what's essential and not essential. Weakness to yellow or whatever is non-essential.

Plus it gives an interesting tension with Batman if you're looking at a JL movie. On the one hand you've got the ultimate vigilante with a moral code who's unashamedly doing what he thinks is right and fuck anyone that disagrees. On the other hand you've got someone working within the system that's been empowered by the law but also clearly shows how external and 'alien' that kind of system is to those it's enforced on. So you can get a healthy bit of back and forth with GL criticising Batman for working outside the law and Batman questioning where the right to set laws comes from that makes GL any better.

Ultimately though I think the point about DC movie producers and directors being a little embarrassed by the spandex is true and they're looking for movies that either try and cover the whole cape thing up with grittiness or just go 'fuck it' and ignore plot and acting in favour of spectacle. Thing is I don't think the Dark Knight style gritty atmosphere would work particularly well for a team up movie, especially taking into account the characters that would be teaming up. DC heroes have always been more archetypal and super while Marvel focused a bit more on relatable figures. Either way can make for an entertaining story but the threat for a JL type team up would require something huge. Any pretence at realism would have to go out the window, although at the same time making it cartoonishly silly would kill the drama.

JL Batman cannot be Nolan Batman.

He's got to be the "smarter than you, more motivated than you, more driven than you, no matter whether you're from Krypton or have a magic ring" Batman: someone who lives in a world where magic powers are possible but where human will still has a chance to trump those powers.

It's one reason I'm glad that over the years DC slowly came to recognize that Lex Luthor is almost as interesting a villain for Batman as he is for Superman. Because they might actually have some points of sympathetic connection. I gather Luthor is joining the Justice League in the comics soon, which is a pretty interesting twist. Not that I'm gonna read it, given that it's the nu52 DC with all of its stupidity and ugliness, but still.

I was snowed in yesterday so I caught a lot of a Batman movie marathon.  Under Burton, Bats was part of a dark circus of bizarre characters.  Keaton's mostly understated role helped ground some of this Wonderland fantasy.  Not grim and gritty.  Kilmer's Batman was looking for love and maybe trying to heal from his childhood trauma.  Who better to help than a psychiatrist girlfriend?  Clooney's Batman was, well Clooney hamming it up a bit.  His Batman was the most 'normal' Batman, he publicly worked with the cops and reached out to a troubled Robin.  Of course the movie was ass but Clooney wasn't bad.

Everyone knows the Nolan version and for many it's the iconic Batman.  Not me. Grim and gritty get tiresome and three movies was probably one movie too long.  Or maybe it's because each movie was so long, that third one was ponderous with a capital P.

Anyway, after much wandering, my point is this. The world can take a new version of Batman without shitting itself.  Make him like the JLA Morrison Batman and I'll be happy.  He's supposed to be 'The World's Greatest Detective', lets see it.

I never found Nolans batman films grim or gritty. I can say that about Rises more than Knight and Begins is too nonchalant to be anything. For example without the Joker the only real moral squandry is the fake fallout between fox and bruce over the nsa wet dream project. And its only grimy dew to the implications, beyond that the machine isn't really explored, fox quiting out of moral outrage seems kinda off coming from the same man who hands and develops military grade hardware to the questionably sane. At least Rises goes into the depth of despair, sees a man broken and a city lose hope. Sigh in a lot of ways Nolans films did more damage than good to batman.

Well, it depends on whether you think of Batman has the costumed hero or Batman as the normal guy with a lot of money, motivation and training. Nolan's Batman didn't have some of the genius deduction I personally had gotten used to (felt like Alfred carried that role more than Bruce). It also didn't have basically-an-asshole-all-the-time Batman thing either (I feel like Arrow does that better). And it lacked a whole bunch of other things people would associated with Batman from some era of the comics.

But it did go into the plight of the man well.

I didn't much care for Rises. As a movie, it had some of the same problems of Dark Knight (pacing, length, editiing) but without Heath Ledger to offset the issues. But at least it did try to remind us about the difference between the cowl and the man, by forcing them to be separate for so much of the movie. Like Tony Stark/suit of armor.

These kinds of comic book movies can't really please ardent fans of the comic itself, especially since even that community sub-divides. But, the foundation of the characters can make for good movie going experiences. They have all the hallmarks of summer seat-filling movies, and come with the benefit of having to spend slightly less attention on establishing a story from scratch.

Sure it can, but that part of the contract relies somewhat on the movie viewer. I'm a huge bat-nerd, and love the three Nolan films. They are going to be inherently different, if only because someone else is writing him. The characters, as we've pointed out, change to various degrees when there are different writers through the years. A movie version is just one more change.

Right. But you're open minded to love the franchise and the individual takes on it. I'm similar with Star Trek. For me, if someone tries to take the franchise seriously, that's good enough for me, even if it means reinventing pieces of it.

I was more talking about the neckbeards.

Fuck them in their tiny batholes.

We're keeping in mind who will be playing Batman, right?

I must be the only person on this board that didn't much care for The Dark Knight. I mean The actors were fine but the plot was a ridiculous "The Jokers is so clever that everyone does exactly what he wants then to do even if doing so is retarded because he is such a genius" by a person that saw too many screenings of SAW. It's dark and depressing to be dark and depressing. Hell my sister saw it and we had a big discussion afterwords with my entire family agreeing that the thing was boring as fuck. If you don't by into the premise that the Joker is so clever and amazing, and none of us did because it requires everyone bar the Joker to be acting like idiots for no good reason at all, the movie was crap.

And frankly, The growl voice of Batman became tiresome and ridiculous though the movie.

I loved Batman Begins but this one, no.

The Batman growl from the last trilogy was - by far - the worst part of it for me.  I thought it was a joke when he started doing it in the first movie and was sure it'd be dropped. 

I don't have the Affleck hate gene.

I hate Begins its such a nothing film. If you skipped Begins for Knight or Returns you wouldn't miss anyrhing.

I don't either. Granted he has been in some awful films but he did solid work in them. I'm willing to wait and see how he does.

Really, he's the perfect Bruce Wayne, no one can believe he is Batman.


Did we make that joke already? Whatever I'm going with it!

Whut ?

So. uh.... what?

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/jesse-eisenberg-jeremy-irons-are-lex-luthor-alfred-in-zack-snyders-batman-vs-superman-20140131

This could be a level of comedic performance never before seen.

Oh, I get it... it is a live action parallel of The Super Hero Squad Show.

Irons as Alfred is intersting casting, at least.  But Eisenberg?  With Afleck as Bats and Eisenberg as Luther, Cavill is going to look imposing as heck.  So will Amy Adams, though.

Wierd. But when I think Arrow and I think what's on the rest of CW and I think the audience they're shooting for, it kinda makes sense. Even if it makes me feel old as dirt.


I kinda get it but I don't feel it myself. I didn't hate Daredevil and don't think he'd necessarily do a bad job as Batman. I just need to unthink all the things I did like about Nolan's trilogy. And by way of interesting coincidences (http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/not-the-hero-we-want)...

I don't hate Affleck but when I think Batman, I think at least brooding.  I can't see Affleck effectively brooding.  Even Keaton managed to brood.  This cast is starting to remind me of the cast of Batman & Robin.

He brooded a fair bit in Daredevil.

Eisenberg can play a smart dickbag well... but I just think he looks WAY TOO YOUNG to be a convincing Lex Luthor. I don't get this casting at all. Irons is fine as Alfred.

He tried to, but I wouldn't say it was effective.

You guys do realize that you are the neckbeards right? The guy has plenty of chops for a super hero movie unless all of you watched Now You See Me and Double whatever those are and he was horrible in them?

Its been 4 years since Social Network and 5 since Zombieland, which are the films I saw and remember him from and yes he was still pretty kid-like but I don't see any reason to worry about that here. Things like makeup, wardrobe and you know the acting and dialogue can change our perception of his age just fine I'd think.

Seems like wondering about what the guy who wrote Argo will do when he re-drafts the script would be way more productive and will make a much bigger difference in how this movie turns out.

Yes, he was horrible in them.  He'll be horrible in this.  He's not a good actor.  At all, as far as I've seen.

I should point out that I'm not hating on it. I like Eisenberg and he can play a dickhead pretty well. It was just so left field. The Jeremy Irons casting is the weirder one for me, honestly. Just doesn't seem to quite fit.

Jeremy Irons was great in the Dungeons & Dragons movie.  Just saying.

I confused Jeremy Irons with Michael Ironside. Now THAT would have been a interesting Alfred  :why_so_serious:

Alfred, reimagined as an ex-Navy SEAL?

Woodhouse?

I love Jeremy Irons but for fucks sake you might as well get Alan Rickman to play Alfred if you are going that direction.  It's just, weird.

Though, I would pay double a ticket fee to hear Rickman say "Master Bruce."

Plot twist: Alfred now despises Wayne.

Are we going to get Reversal of Fortune Jeremy Irons, or D&D the Movie Jeremy Irons?

I hope it's The Borgias Jeremy Irons and it turns out he's really Batman and Bruce Wayne is just a front.   :why_so_serious:

Lolita. (Watch out Carrie Kelley!)

I can see Irons as an Alfred. Not the Michael Caine version, but more of the dry sarcastic character - like IM's Jarvis.

Congrats, you just won, "what was the pitch line to the casting director."  Your noprize is in the mail.

I'm over the neckbeard bellyaching and the post-neckbeard apologism. This movie just sounds dumb from top to bottom.

I'm not really down with their casting choices, but whatever, actors can act, they could pull it off. My concern is that the movie is going to be two hours of Batman holding Superman down and making him drink pee, so to speak, because DC basically hates Superman and Batman has a legion of wanking fans to please.

Batman's superpower is having writers who obsessively suck his dick, and ironically it's made him every bit as dull as anyone ever claimed Superman was. Nobody can ever beat Batman because he's the smartest guy in the universe and always has exactly what he needs, blah blah blah, prep time, blah blah.

It's no longer interesting having him defeat or hold his own guys who have superpowers and are stronger than him on paper, because he's now just the writer's pet who always does that. Yeah, yeah, of course he has secret plans that would let him take down anyone/everyone else in the justice league, of course he's got kryptonite cufflinks or whatever doodad he needs right at hand whenever he needs it. It's Batman, yawn, wake me up when the writer of whatever I'm watching/reading finishes fapping.

......

Did that actually just happen?

No, it happened a day ago.

I agree that some writers (and fans) have gone a little crazy with Batman just being so fucking crafty that he can do anything. I mean, it was stupid even in Dark Knight returns - 60 year old Batman defeats Superman with the power of electricity. Lol.

In the Justice League cartoon Batman is able to dodge Darkseid's eye lasers and Darkseid is like "nobody has dodged my lasers before!" Really? He's fought a guy who can travel at mach speed, a bunch of godlike interstellar beings, and fucking Batman is the first to dodge his lasers?

Batman does sometimes appear to have a superpower that is "I'm fucking Batman" that translates into "I can do anything." Which does somewhat defeat the purpose of a non-super-powered character.

This is the problem the Justice League as always run into. You have a guy like Superman who is basically a god, fighting next to a woman with wings and a mace. It works if Superman is a foil for those characters (which works best in small doses / limited storylines), but more often than not either the other characters somehow step up via the power of positive thinking, or highly contrived storylines make Superman irrelevant / on vacation.

You're really missing some nuance there.

No batman movie has ever made batman crafty like they do in the comics, I'm not sure that's a valid concern for this one either, considering the director.  

Batman got his shit tore up in the last film, so it isn't like he was invincible.  The whole trilogy was pretty consistent on that point.

This is still the dumbest idea ever.  Just because they exist in the same universe in the comics (which only the neckbeards care about), doesn't mean they should on the big screen.  Throwing in WW doesn't help matters, even less so when she doesn't even match what we think WW should look like in any way.

But but....marvel did it and made a shitton of money, what could go wrong?!

Man you guys act like movies are suddenly parallels to real life. Their more comic books now than ever. So let me get this straight batman finds the joker by using a machine that turns every cellphone into a sonar device (yeah I glad they glossed over explaining how that worked) and than uses this machine to find the joker with pinpoint accuracy despite no one in that building holding a cellphone.  :drill:

I know there was more to it than that but it was still a very apparent case of "hero X won because it was hero X's book."



The Avengers group of Iron Man, Hulk and Thor works pretty well together. But even in the Avengers they clearly had some trouble figuring out relevant stuff for Hawkeye, Black Widow and Captain America to do. Hawkeye spent a lot of the movie brainwashed, Black Widow's big scene was a conversation with Loki, and in every fight Captain America did a highly contrived gymnastics routine. The fate of the world rests on him swinging around on an I-Beam or some shit.

I don't envy the people trying to write a workable Superman / Batman / WW movie. You have to introduce WW entirely, introduce a new Batman, explain why they are together, and come up with some scenario where they are all useful.

I like the approach the JL animated series took with a guy like The Question - it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to be throwing punches next to Superman, so instead he does investigative work and takes on small scale quirky cases. But I don't think you can do that in Batman / WW / Superman movie.

If they have any sense, JL members who aren't Batman or Superman will be a cameo, save them havng to explain anything.

That said, if they had any sense, they'd have Irons play Batman, Affleck direct the thing, and Snyder can play Alfred or something. Or he can just fuck off.

I've been trying to figure out what the plot of this movie will be. I think the most likely arc will be:

Batman figures out who Superman really is and goes to Metropolis the pile of rubble that was Metropolis to introduce himself. Hopefully Batman says "oh, by the way numbskull, if you have to fight another super powered bad guy, do it outside of city limits mmkay?"

Luthor decides that Superman is a menace, both to his criminal enterprises and to the safety of Metropolis and poisons him with Kryptonite, depowering him.

Batman and a depowered Superman have to work together to take down Luther. Before this they have a knockdown drag out fight because Snyder saw it in the Avengers and wants his movie to make $1 billion dollars. Wonder Woman stops them, then poses to look sexy before leaving to deal with another issue.

Batman and Superman fight Lex Luthor. Depowered Superman would have learned how fragile humans really are due to being depowered but since it is a Zach Snyder movie he instead kicks Luthor off of a high rise while screaming "This! Is! Metropolis!", gets his powers back, and circles the globe, not to revive Lois Lane, but as a victory lap.

End.

 :facepalm:

Nuance really isn't your thing, is it?

Are we really pretending that Captain America doing gymnastics so that he can pull a lever to stop a flying aircraft carrier from falling out of the sky is "nuance?"

They needed to give Captain America something to do so they came up with contrived scenarios that played to his strengths. It's like having a guy on the team that can shrink and on every mission there's a tiny doorway that only he can enter. Nuance!

I have to kinda agree.  I really loved Avengers, but CA had to be pretty much shoe-horned into it.  I actually thought they did a better job getting Hawkeye and Black Widow to make sense (though to be fair, the only thing you have to do to get Scarlett to fit into any movie is to have her stare at the camera), because they are clearly meant to be second tier superheroes.  Captain America is a first stringer, with second stringer abilities and plenty of contrived parkour being shown.    He also came across as an unlikable douche, so even the leadership angle didn't work.

I think he comes off better in the stand alone movie.  I saw Avengers first, and didn't like him at all.  The Captain America movie helped redeem things a bit, because his powers make more sense in that context.

Anyway, as soon as you put Batman together with Superman, you end up with the same problem.  Batman is another first stringer with second stringer abilities (shit, technically it is probably third stringer since he doesn't actually have anything superhuman).  The only way this works on any level is to somehow reduce Supes, pretty much as Margalis describes.  And the only reasonable way to do that is kryponite, and fuck that in the ear already.

Agree. They did a pretty good job with Hawkeye and Black Widow, all things considered.

With Cap his powers didn't lend themselves to much, and him being an excellent leader didn't come across well either. They tried - in the end battle he sort of lays out their plan, but it's pretty lame. In the comics he often provides the human glue that keeps the team together, but that's hard to make work in a movie.

Haem, you should really watch it again (or not) and look at how much of Cap's action is swinging around on stuff.

They ALL came across as unlikeable douches except for Banner who was likeable because he literally had no other option beyond turning into a giant rage monster.

That was kind of the point of Avengers Assemble.

Ironman is a dick, but an extremely charismatic, sarcastic and funny one as far as the audience is concerned.  Everyone wants to be, or be friends with, Tony Stark.

Thor is a dick, but has the big ole hunky Adonis type charisma that human beings are automatically drawn to, whether we like it or not.

Hulk is a dick, but in a totally awesome and sometimes hilarious way.  We also feel bad for him, so there's that.

Cap is a dick....and yep, pretty much just a dick.  He needs some kind of schtick, something that we can respond to positively.

The avengers movie had almost zero time to establish any character growth at all,  I don't know what people expect could have been done in the time allotted.

A lot of "boy scout" characters can come off as douches if their handling is a little off. And Whedon leans heavily towards everybody being a douche already.

That's a fair enough comment, but they still need to find a way to make CA seem more useful to the group.  If you magically erased him from the last movie, what's the worse thing that happens?  Eh, maybe like 10 more civilians dies.  Do that with any of the other three, and Loki takes over the whole fucking world.

Actually, for me, I responded better to Cap because he was a man out of time and had a much, much healthier view of the world.  I suspect (and have some inkling due to the trailers) that's what I'll like about the next Cap film also.

Basically, I liked Cap, so fuck all y'all.  Or something.

The usual way of making Captain America matter in team adventures in the comics mostly apply to Batman in the Justice League:

1) Indomitableness (fairly similar to Batman's writer-enhanced abilities to always have a plan). He's the last guy standing, somehow, usually with the assistance of his shield. He's the guy that talks the bad guy out of it, somehow gets to his feet when even gods and monsters are down, has a plan when everyone else has given up, fights on even when he's badly wounded, etc.  Very hard to do in a film.
2) Team leaderliness. I think there's a way to do this but yeah, it means he has to be the guy that everybody trusts even when they don't trust each other. Which means he has to be something he often hasn't been in the comics, which is someone with a lot of emotional intelligence--a guy who gets you, whomever you are, and knows how to talk to you, whomever you are. The way they do it in the comics instead is that he's the ultimate Dudley Do-Right, who always knows what's right, who is always honest and transparent, etc.--but that's not enough in a 21st Century setting, where we've maybe grown up enough to know that sometimes there isn't one single thing that's right and everything else completely wrong, and that being brutally honest at all times and all situations is actually a sort of sociopathic way to live.
3) Tactical leaderliness. The Avengers' version of Ender Wiggen who somehow sees that the enemy's gate is down. Also really hard to do in a film, and hard to do without doing the Batman-always-has-a-plan kind of writing.
4) By giving him supreme leadership over the street-level guys, etc.--sort of the boss of all the vigilantes, the spies and ninjas, the specialists, the hand-to-hand guys. The trainer who teaches everybody baseline combat skills, etc.   This works well, but then you have to have part of the story be "things that gods and monsters can't do", just as you would with a Justice League story.

You have to start in both cases with a story that genuinely has something that muscle and speed can't accomplish. In a JL story, that can be: a villain who can't be touched without triggering retaliation against all superheroes (e.g., Luthor looks like a good guy, has the law and government on his side, etc.); a villain who has something to counter the muscle and speed (kryptonite, etc.); a street-level villain who is keeping the muscle and speed occupied with his own muscle and speed while he goes off and executes the master plan, etc.

Well...I kinda do too in his own movie, because absolutely everything about him makes sense.  I am really only picking on how he comes across in the Avengers movie, and making a parallel to how Batman has the same issues if he's teamed with Superman.

Edit:  changed to to too.

It's ok, I get that.  I'm not REALLY telling you to go fuck yourself.  That would be something of an overreaction given the movie.  :)

Make him like Goku, every time he gets beat up he gets stronger, more agaile, heal faster.

Shit, give him like a stealthy suit (predator style) or something so that he can blend in with the background or something.  There, now he's super useful, and it doesn't require an exaggeration of his powers.

You almost had it, then you dismissed it. Cap is not there for "gymnastics," he's there for leadership. And I don't just mean leadership of these all-powerful beings - though he does have the stones to carry that off. No, Captain America is there to provide a public face of leadership, to assure the general public that yes, these fuckers can destroy mountains and there are aliens blowing up shit in New York, but this "REGULAR GUY" is there to pull them together and lead them, he's there to inspire people. The scene in Avengers where he orders the panicking cops to set up a perimeter and all that - that's the shit Captain America was there to do. No, it isn't hitting things very loudly but it is just as important to SHIELD and to the Avengers. He also gave specific assignments to the super powered folks - hit them here, drive those units that way, etc. He's the battlefield general.

This.  Cap is a leader, and his core beliefs and morality is why almost every superhero in Marvel will follow him into battle. 

This is just one of those literary problems that has existed forever. My favorite example was Hercules joining the voyage of the Argonauts and then having to fuck off before getting to do anything. They've been sending Superman off on space vacation to let Batman have some fun since antiquity.

The only alternatives to mixing gods and humans are making the Superman-level characters so remote that the drama is mostly about whether they can be motivated to give a shit (Dr. Manhattan) or making them genuine gods who rule over humanity (Miracleman). Otherwise you somehow write stories where there are things gods can't do that humans have to do, or there are too many things for gods to do so there's stuff in there that humans need to do as well. (That's basically Superman and lots of his iterations in the comics, like Samaritan in Astro City.) 

Sidebar:  Hey!  Another Astro City fan! Wasn't that comic the bees knees?

Look at it from this direction:  Could Thor have stopped the Chitauri by himself?  Right after New York didn't he just stop the Dark Elf invasion pretty much by himself?  Think of the Avengers movie and tell me where Thor couldn't have done it solo.  But it was a team movie so he didn't.

The Chitauri invasion was also significantly larger than the Dark Elf invasion.

Plus, he did have help.

huh? Thor didn't do anything in "The dark world" by himself.  He was constantly being helped along by Asgardians and Humans, he ultimately defeated the dark elves but it was far from a solo effort.

The Dark Elf invasion force that reached earth was nowhere NEAR the scale of the Chitauri attack, and the rest of the Dark Elf forces pretty much faceplanted themselves all over Asguard trying to get into the city.  Also, events of Dark world take place what appears to be at least 1, possibly as much as 2 years after Newyork.  Otherwise, Jane would not have been almost over him enough to begin trying to date other guys.

Also, Padme wouldn't have said to James Hunt "huh, it's been 2 years since new mexico".

Thor really doesn't do much of anything in his own movie. Does he beat Malikith... nope... save the world from eternal darkness... nope.... beat super dark elf... nope.... defeat an army of dark elves soldiers by himself... nope. I'm kinda wondering how much they are willing to down grade suoperman for the sake of sequals and the team up movies. Thor kinda started waaaaaaaay gimped so any decrease in superman's power level would be noticeable.

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor

Are you reporting news, Bloodworth?

fixed  :why_so_serious:

http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a549413/jesse-eisenbergs-lex-luthor-to-be-bald-with-sleeve-tattoo-spoilers.html

*cough*Latino Review*cough*

I wouldn't put a lot of faith into anything they say.

No. They made a very clear point about how this didn't matter. His kitted-out battle tank didn't matter. His new-Robin didn't matter. His suit, it plugged into the power grid, and all the strength it gave him didn't matter.

It was all a set up to Ollie shooting that kryptonite arrow so that Superman would catch it at the same moment Wayne had the faux heart attack (and even that didn't work out perfectly).

This actually corrolates to Cap in the Avengers movie. They have him doing gymnastics just so he has a seat at the table. But as was discussed on this page, his real role is the leadership he shows first by trying to get the team to work together and then ultimately to run the strategy for the battle in NY. He just needed the powers for the movie because the part of the non-super human leader was already being played by Fury.

Now, I won't say I think they pulled that off well, just that it was their intent :-)

I just don't think they pulled off the leadership angle well AT ALL.  He basically pissed them all off on the carrier.  In New York, the impression I came away with was that he was directing all the unimportant stuff, whiles IM, Hulk and Thor did all the world-saving.  I may have missed a thing here or there, but that's what I remember.  He comes across as just slightly better than useless.

Again, I like CA, particularly in his own movie.  I think Whedon needs to work harder to put him on more equal footing with the rest of the Avengers, however.

You know the pissed them off had a lot to do with the mind gem, right? Additionally, it's hard to be in charge with a group of crazy people who have all operated on their own previously, which was what they were showing.

But more over,  he's a BATTLEFIELD leader, which they illustrated quite well. He's not the leader-leader. That's Fury/SHIELD.

THEY WERE ALL DOUCHEBAGS AND NOT A TEAM.  THEN THEY BECAME A TEAM.

IT'S LIKE YOUR MISSING THE POINT OF THE WHOLE FILM FOR THE FUN OF IT.

Stop it.  It's kinda silly.

Jesus wept, it was even called 'Avengers Assemble'.

Thor - I am a God and here to do my shit, don't get in my way.
Hulk - I want to be left alone to the point of suicide
Iron Man - I am just better than all of you.  And rich.  So, so rich.
Black Widow - I could kill you all with my vagina.
Hawkeye - Brood.  Brood, brood, brood, crows nest.
Captain America - I have no fucking idea what's going on in this timestream and it confuses and angers me and who are all these douchebags ?

The fact that they all magically forget everything that they did and learned in their own films was entirely on point.  It was about building a team and let me tell you when you build a team in real life, it's pretty much like that fucking film.

Even with Loki.  I fucking hate when Loki turns up in real life.  Goddamn mind gems and trying to tell people we pay overtime and shit.

I volunteer to test that boast.


http://alturl.com/83jto
Mikey is really just Loki in disguise.

So, I'm just going to throw out that Superman and Batman are great foils to each-other.  You have the boyscout and the dark cynical one. Granted in the comics it works a lot better because you can have thought bubbles, where each respects the other for what they do. It will be really tough to show the mutual respect they have for the other. 

Or it can be a cop buddy movie.

I have a feeling we are going to get the cop buddy movie unfortunately.

Because you couldn't hate Zak Synder enough, he will direct the Justice League movie (http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2014/04/28/zack-snyder-will-direct-justice-league-after-batman-vs-superman?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+geeksofdoom+%28GEEKS+OF+DOOM%29).

I actually don't have a problem with this, but I'm sure someone's beard just got a little heated and neckly.

Eh, I see so many small signs that WB still doesn't have a fucking clue about how to handle this IP that Synder is only a small piece of it all.

DC just keep fucking the dog.

We finally got Man of Steel over here and we lasted about 20-30 mins before we changed the channel.  Fucking Woeful movie.

I don't hate Snyder. Visually the guy has a lot of talent. Sucker Punch showed that he should never write again though, and most peoples' biggest issue with Watchmen seemed to be that Snyder stuck too rigidly to the source material which, let's face it, is probably the smallest sin an Alan Moore adaptation has committed. Didn't see the Owl movie, but Man of Steel had a lot of talented people involved in the process and it just didn't turn out well.

That said, I'm not looking forward to these upcoming DC movies at all.

I still think you guys are giving Man of Steel too much shit, as I really liked everything up to the killing of Zod. I understand your concerns with the tone, but I liked it. The "we destroyed Metropolis and either nobody died or no one cared" criticisms I just can't take seriously because LOLCOMICSMOVIE. I think the "we have literally draped everything in a turquoise filter to make explosions pop more" is a more valid criticism.

Sucker Punch, though... yeah, that was a dreadful fucking mistake on almost every level. And I don't see how sticking to the source material hurt Watchmen at all, considering he changed the ending pretty significantly and for the better, IMO.

Yeah Man of Steel was better for me than the X-Men/Spiderman/Batman movies I didn't like. Which is good enough considering I find Supes to be lame as fuck as a hero. It certainly was not Ghost Rider or Fantastic Four bad and I'm guessing Green Latern was much much worse. I have never watched ten minutes of that one.

Best comic book movie? Certainly not. Disservice to comic book movies / some kind of big letdown of such a cool and interesting character? I don't get it. How can you say that.

Watchman was fantastic, I saw it a week or two ago and it holds up well. Anyone bitching about that just loves bitching a bit too much.

Seeing as Marvel just gave a master's class on how to handle your moral pillar comic book hero, I would think MoS failure to have Superman act like Superman is abundantly clear.

Anyway, watching WB flop on the floor like fish is fun, so I am all for a JL movie.

The Watchmen thing is just the general impression I got from a lot of the complaints I read about it. Personally I thought it was ok, but I've never felt the need to watch it again after the first time I saw it. Man of Steel to me wasn't horrible but it was fairly forgettable. Nothing about the story or the acting really stuck with me.

Nah, I think I'm giving it just the right amount of shit.  I haven't been that uninterested, uninvested and bored of a hero movie in, well, a long time.

And did we REALLY need another origin story of Superman ?  I mean, did we ?

It was a shambles, what little of it I saw.  Jor El outrunning a spaceship on a dragon was merely the start.   :uhrr:

I rate MoS above two of the Nolan Batman movies.  Re-watched MoS yesterday and it holds up pretty good. 

Snyder gets too much shit in my opinion. 

300-Great movie, though I think most folks missed the 'unreliable narrator' who made Persians into giants and monsters.
Watchmen-Personally I loved it and he even made the story better by removing the alien aspect.  Might have been TOO faithful.
Sucker Punch-Great visuals can't make up for a horrible, horrible script and story.
MoS-If you HAVE to do an origin do it like this, mix it up.  The super fighting was cool and some of the most comic book-like in any movie.  Everyone bitching about Supes killing Zod; maybe that's why Supes now has a no kill policy.  It was his origin story after all.

To sum up I guess I like Snyder, because he does take some narrative risks in these multi-million dollar projects. So I'm OK for him to do the JL movie.  He may be DC's only hope.

I enjoyed Man of Steel. I never need to see it again, but I don't regret the time I spent watching it. It's not high on my list of comic movies, but it's not the worst. It's pretty average.

Saying, "Oh 300 is just an unreliable narrator" is like saying "Oh Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will are just an unreliable narrator" except that 300 is too silly to take super-seriously as racial/civilizational propaganda. (Though that's pretty much what Frank Miller seems to have wanted people to take it as.)

Watchmen I liked better than I expected to.

Other than that Snyder blows. But in this case it's really not his fault, at least, not all by himself.

I'm a shameless Snyder fan; 300 was awesome, Watchmen was alright for someone who hasn't read the comics, Sucker Punch was great as a turn-off-your-brain live action anime, and MoS was the best Supes film I've seen.

Maybe Rises but if you are trying to say MOS is better than Batman Begins, you are certifiably insane.

I liked Daredevil more than Man of Steel. 

I didn't like Costner's paranoia. I really liked the female Kryptonian (whose name escapes me). She's what I'd hope Wonder Woman would be like on film, but probably a little less hostile.  Honestly, a not-ready-for-primetime Superman should get his butt handed to him by trained soldiers IMO. The only advantage he had going was that he was used to his powers. So overall I liked the film, but I think it was on par with either of the Hulk movies.

I thought Daredevil was fine. I've learrned that is a minority opinion...

I also thought Man of Steel was great! He calls into question the cheerleading of shit best left to the poliitics board. Snyder deserves kudos for making politics fun  :grin:

The Director's Cut of Daredevil was a decent comic-book action movie, the one released to the cinema was bad.

There was a lack of synergy and some notable quality gaps in Man of Steel from its composite elements, notably how the material was presented from the expectations of the character. Superman... angst! So many plot issues. Faora was the best part of the movie only because tough and dark appeals to me. Short black hair? Yes. Appreciation of the beauty aside, her character had some great moments playing off Chris Meloni's character.

Snyder/Millar Side-Bar: I thought 300 was a movie that was very cool and fresh (however much Snyder had to do with that). If Millar wanted to create his own interpretation of "Sparta was awesome and here's why", that's within his right as a creative (I would equate as the same as Aronosky's interpretation of Noah). I don't think he was after historical accuracy, but history as a pretext to tell an interesting comic book story / creative project.

However, I thought the sequel was an unnecessary follow-up, more cash-grab inheriting only the style of story-telling green-lit because of 300's success. A Dame To Kill For may be like this, but it inherits more than "black and white stylistic comic-book visualization", which should allow it to match its predecessor in quality and entertainment value.

That follow up is the only movie I've walked out on in a while. It was terrible on every possible level.

Miller expressly wanted to make a story about manly white people standing against the dirty brown people from the East. That's become even more clear with time.

Mike Millar and Frank Miller are two different people.

Just barely though.

Whores Whores Whores.

One's a Scottish dickbag with pretensions of Grant Morrison. The other is an American dickbag with drawing skills and virulent Islamophobia.

First image of Batfleck? (as tweeted by Snyder)

(http://i.imgur.com/3hRU6px.jpg)

 :headscratch:

Posed, that is a good image (IMHO).  I somehow doubt it will look so good when he is moving given that most of what we're seeing has to be a padded suit.  Affleck does not look like that image - not in the least.

 :facepalm:

It'll look like a big rubber suit.  It's Batman as Godzilla.

So bad.

It is a very good match - posed - to some of the iconic Batman images that have yet to be used as a Template for a live action Batman.  I can't imagine it looking good in motion, but it is perfectly fine as posed there. 

I think the casting is horrible, and the movie is seemingly headed down almost every wrong path possible - but I have more problems with the Batmobile than I do the Batman in that still image.

I can't really look at it in any fair critical manner without thinking "WTF ARE YOU THINKING CASTING BEN AFFLECK".

So, in short, meh.

What...I don't even....this is like saying Batman Forever was better than the DarkKnight. It just doesn't compute in any rational universe. Even with its 70s campiness, the first Christopher Reeves movie and parts of the second are a million times better than MoS.

Absolutely fair.  As far as I'm concerned, Marvel has done things exceptionally well (not perfect, but far better than my expectations).  They realized how their characters work on the screen and put them to work.  

DC, on the other hand, has blown everything.  Their Superman has the wrong personality.  They can't decide whether their TV properties are part of the same universe or not.  Their casting is mind-boggling... and their characters are generally MUCH harder to translate to the screen.  They have a harder road, are walking in the wrong direction, and don't even seem to know it.  

I seriously think they'd be better pulling all of their plugs over the next few years with a goal to relaunch the universe.  Do a Spring TV limited series in a few years that spends one hour per hero introducing the Justice League origen stories - and then put a real Justice League in theaters for that summer.  Then, put together your mix of TV series, movies, limited series, etc... in a combined universe as well thought out as Marvel's - which can capitalizing on the work Marvel has done to slowly build acceptance of the wilder aspects of the Marvel Universe.

Maybe Ben Affleck tried that one secret tip the gym doesn't want you to know about building muscle.

Affleck's been bulking up for a while now.

I liked dropping scalding coffee on my dick more than Man of Steel.

I guess it's my age; I saw them as a teenager in the 90s and the camp was a huge turnoff. I haven't seen any Smallville either (and don't read comics nor watch any superhero cartoons), so my only other experience is Superman Returns which was an awful movie that even Kevin Spacey couldn't save. So, I stand by my point; MoS was a good popcorn action flick, giving me DBZ style fights on the big screen that I've been dreaming of for years. It wasn't a great movie, but given my experience with the character the bar was not high.

I need to point out that comparing superman films is like discussing which venereal disease you want to avoid least.

Smallville is better than all of them, and Lois and Clark is better than that.

 :heart:

Rule 34 gets more interesting every day.

I recognize that there are Superman fans who take issue with his depiction in MoS.  Can someone articulate to me this position?  As a casual fan who has seen the film once and enjoyed it, I note the following:

* Superman in MoS was arguably at his weakest as an untrained and untested farmboy who had heretofore only ever won a bar fight.

*  Suddenly he's faced with someone at least as strong as he is, from the same planet, with the Sun conferring the same benefits, with the only difference being that he was trained from birth in martial arts for war.

*  Superman has an initial advantage in that he has learned to control his powers, to focus his senses and not be distracted by the overwhelming sensory overload, but over the course of their encounter, that advantage quickly dissipates.

*  As the balance of power shifts towards Zod, Zod makes no bones about his intention to eradicate the human race as an act of vengeance.

*Superman finally kills Zod while Zod is trying to use heat vision (which he has just mastered, further indicating his growing power)to murder innocents.  After pleading with him, and struggling to stop him, he finally kills Zod.

So, against that desperate backdrop, it's hard to fathom what else he should have done.  Any contrived solution that you could envision where he incapacitates Zod and they imprison him would be a huge gamble with the lives of the entire human race.

Zod has nothing left to live for, he and Superman are the only two surviving members of their species.  He cannot be reasoned with.  No amount of punching him through a mountain would stop him.  No prison on earth could hold him.

Is what people are really saying is that a Superman story should never put Superman in that position?  That the character's fiction can't allow a choice between the lesser of two evils because the character of Superman always finds a miraculous way to save the day with zero collateral damage? 

I think that's essentially it, yes.  Similar to how Archie comics never deal with teenage pregnancy, Superman comics do not deal with any sort of moral grey area.

Weird. It's kind of like admitting you're dumb and you like dumb stuff.

Well, that and the fact that all Zod needed to do was to move his eyes instantly to the right to fry the family, instead of his entire head.  I couldn't stop thinking about that during and after the scene.  I understood why Supes killed him, that was fine.  Christopher Reeve also killed the shit out of his Zod.

I liked MoS better than most around here, but I can think of a few things I didn't like about it:

- There is almost no Superman doing super things endearing him to the general public long before the appearance of the bad guys.  The people don't care about Superman, so why the fuck should we.  
- I disliked virtually everything about Zod.  I much prefer the pure evil that was the original Zod back in the 80s, not to mention Non and Ursa (who herself was responsible for many a confusing dream for my pre-pubescent self).  I didn't need all that backstory for Zod.  I didn't need to find know that he had sorta valid reasons (or at least ones we could relate to) about what he was doing.  I just wanted him to talk in an amazing accent and tell people to kneel before him and ask them why they would say such things to him when they knew he would only kill them.
-As campy as it was, I always liked doofy Clark Kent, bumbling around, knocking over shit and totally looking like Superman only with his hair parted the wrong way, totally pining after Lois Lane.  We got zero of that, and the dynamic between them is now set in stone.

The effects were cooler than shit, and it was otherwise a perfectly fine superhero flick.  

I strongly disliked Man of Steel because it was a very, very poorly executed film.  Nevermind Larry Hagman as Zod and how-does-he-shave and EMO and all the other complaints: it was edited by an incompetent.

No.  No, he fucking didn't.  What film did you watch ?

Captain America found a way cut through the grey so can Superman.

Besides the movie gave Clark a way to imprison Zod the same way he was imprisoned earlier.

Erm, didn't he pretty much crush his hand, pick him up and toss him against the ice wall where he fell down into some kind of horrible crevice?  Looked pretty death-inducing to me.  What am I missing?

Being put back into the Phantom Zone?

He was suppose to Take the third option (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TakeAThirdOption) and be a hero not the lesser of two evils and be a regular dude.

Seriously, where in the movie is it implied that they all didn't simply die?  I recall nothing, but maybe I missed something.

Comic books are fiction and fantasy.  Any argument that "The real world is nothing but grey areas"  is flawed and just as dumb because superman does not live in the real world.  Superman lives in a fictional world of fantasy and pixie farts and as such he can lift a bus. 

Fantasy movies are about telling stories where a hero can overcome the lesser of two evils, where dreams can be reality.  Gritty realism is fun to watch sometimes and it works with some super heroes like batman but when it comes to superman, the character is already so ridiculous and fantastical in premise that trying to insert realism feels forced and grates on the viewer.

That's almost incidental.  For a start, they all slid into fog.  Maybe they died, maybe they didn't.

The point is Superman engineered it in such a way that he depowered them and removed the threat.

This whole fucking slew of new age American shit where torturing people and killing them is always the only answer just fucking, fucking, fucking SUCKS especially from your Superheroes who SHOULD KNOW BETTER for the sake of fucking GRIMDARK just makes me so angry.

Look at Cap 2.  That's kinda how you do it.

Superman is incredibly hard to directly translate to film because of his power level.  His speed, strength, etc... are so off the charts that it is hard to imagine a way to represent a challenge to him using conventional concepts without earth shattering implications.  A fight between Zod and Superman should have destroyed Metropolis without the machine being involved - and done it over the span of a few seconds given their ability to move so fast and their massive power levels.  It is one of the problems that makes DC's challenges much greater than Marvel: Outside of psychological/moral challenges, there is no challenge (outside of Achilles Heels in the form of Kryptonite, Magic, or depowerment stories) that can challenge him without the need for obvious collateral damage on the scale of a nuclear weapon.

Regardless, the critics of the movie point to his code of ethics and his unwillingness to kill and say it should not have been broken in the origen story.  There is definitely a potential for a good story in which his resolve to avoid killing is pushed and exceeded by a particular threat, but it should not be in an introductory story.  That would be like doing a Wolverine origen film in which he loses his healing factor, a Star Trek reboot without the Enterprise, or a Deadpool origen movie in which he is sane.  You don't break the rules in the same breath you establish them.   Basic storytelling.

Hmm, interesting perspective.  I wonder how many people interpreted it that way when they saw it.  If I was a betting man, I'd guess the average viewer saw him trick them, depower them, and then totally kill Zod.  He also totally crushed the shit out of his hands first, which was a bit unnecessary, no? 

That said, I totally agree with the general point you are making.

This. SO MUCH THIS. And I say that as someone who like Man of Steel except the killing.

I've stopped watching TV shows (Hawaii 5-0 and 24) because they were rather cavalier about torturing people and breaking laws and shit. I get tired of that narrative crutch.

What's interesting is taking a person with uncompromising ideals and then placing them in positions that beg for compromise.  That's drama.

Would the "real Superman" allow 7 billion people to die because he was afraid to kill a dangerous and murderous psychopath that was also trying to kill him?  I guess that's an argument but don't act like it's a good thing.

Not being a Superman fan or anything, do we often see "Technically it was the fall that killed him" which is employed by various other heroes who decide to not save a villain?

Also I didn't watch the end of Man of Steel.  Presumably since the Phantom Zone Stargate is destroyed, something creative had to be done.  Also I missed the part where he must have done something to make someone bald.  However, I find that I do not care due to complete mishandling of the entire movie at the cinematic layer.  I didn't see the one where someone shot a bullet into Superman's eye, but it had to have been better than this.

- Disney Villain Death: Zod's crew after being depowered are knocked down a chasm or fall in while trying to fly. Deleted scenes (used in some TV cuts) reveal that the villains are not, in fact, dead, and are instead arrested by the "Arctic Patrol," but in other cuts, it certainly looks like Superman lets the villains die. Not only that, but it looks like Lois commits her first murder!

Source: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/SupermanII

All I ever get from these MoS discussions is some people really really hate Snyder so therefore MoS must have been one of the worst comic book movies made and definitely was not true enough to Superman blahblahblah.

I fucking hate Superman. I don't really like DC in general and it was a watchable movie. The evil girl was hot. The evil guy was ok. The fights were comprehensible considering the speed things were supposed to be going at. It wasn't great but Superman stories aren't very great. The part with his dad and the dog had feels and that was nice. In fact his family stuff was pretty good. The stupid shit with Russel Crowe was stupid but comic stories usually hit you with some junk that could have been left behind.

The stuff with Costner is MST3K level badness.

Son, you must live in fear and let me die because people are small minded and stupid.  I will also die needlessly because I am equally small minded and stupid for doing things I know you wouldn't have gotten injured doing.

Pa Kent herped all the derps in that movie.  I saw it for the first time last weekend because it's on HBO and I regret not changing the channel.  When I fell asleep 45 mins in without seeing Superman I should have known better.

Also: Supes killed Zod by proxy in SM2. sorry, it's always been interpreted as, "and now the bad guy is dead, having plummeted down a giant pit with now powers."  Unless you believe Elsa and the Nazis lived in the Last Crusade, too.  They also fell down a giant chasm into fog.

My main problems with MoS (And I say this as a person that likes some Snyder films, I enjoy the hell out of Watchmen for example):

1) Pa Kent was all wrong. Utterly, utterly wrong. Costner did a good job in the acting department but Pa Kent's main role in Superman is to teach him to be the boyscout he grows up to be. He's the one that instills in him the value of human life and doing the right thing.

2) The fight in Metropolis was wrong on two counts. A) He should have destroyed the machine then lured the villains away. Look at Superman 2, that is what Christopher Reeves did. He fights them briefly, realizes there will be collateral damage and flees to lure them away. and B) Superman has zero emotional reaction to the events that occur in Metropolis and Smallville. I don't want to see him weeping but I would like at least for him to acknowledge how bad it was and perhaps use it as a reason for him to change how he does stuff.

3) We don't get any establishment of him as a hero before Zod shows up. So all the world knows about him is he fought another dude in Metropolis and more or less wiped it off of the face of the Earth.

4) Clark and Lois are one of the central relationships in Superman, yet she only meets him in the last 20 seconds of the movie.

5) Killing Zod was the realistic thing to do. It was not, however,what Superman would do. He'd find another way. When Superman kills it is SHOCKING because it is so rare and I can only think of a handful of times it has happened in the comics.

I'm not a big Superman fan but this possibly my biggest issue, it seems like they really screwed up his parents.  I always thought one of Superman's big background points was that his parents raised him to always do what was right, be good, help others, etc. and that's why he is such a Boy Scout.  That entire scene with his dad seemed to fly in the face of that and be trying to teach him that he should just watch people die rather than reveal himself to anyone.

I wasn't sure about any of that because of how the first half of the movie lurched forward like the final scene in Time Bandits.  It was obviously chopped spinach in order to accommodate the too-long actions sequences that lay atop me for the last section of the "film".

I do, now that you mention it, remember a lot of stupid decisions being made.

Yeah, but it's deliberately vague, I think.  Non fell over.  Ursa got bitchslapped.  Nothing in the scene realllllly said 'MORTAL DANGER' even when he crushed my goddamned hand.

I always thought the fog was just a phantom zone chute, to be honest, but it kinda doesn't matter.

If you think the crushing hand was unnecessary, he went back and kicked FUCK out of the bullying trucker.  So it was BOTH Superman AND Clark getting even to their respective bullies.

Rather neat, I thought.

Man, you're funny.  You really think Elsa died ?

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the universe also knows when to preserve some fine blonde ass.

It's a terrible movie, but I keep seeing people post this and I really have no fucking clue how you missed the large segment of the film where Lois Lane tracks down Clark Kent and says "hey you're superman" then gives him a reason to have faith in humanity and loses her job over it before Zod even arrives on Earth.

I mean, the film is dull, and I'm the guy who couldn't even remember the villain in Amazing Spider-Man 18 months after I saw it, but seriously, were you watching a different edit or something?

He means that Clark Kent, Daily Planet Reporter is out of the picture until the last 20s.  Not "Hey, intrepid Journalist tracks down mystery alien guy" Clark Kent.   Which, since she'd done so before meant they were fucking with the whole origin story because she knows who this reporter is.

I get why people were fucked about it.  It bothered me she knew, but less than it bothered me that she did it while the Government that had a real reason to do the same shit after a confimed UFO flew away didn't.  "Hey where's Jim at?" "Dunno, ship flew off and he was gone. Coincidences, eh!?"

Didn't we have a thread for this?  :awesome_for_real:

I enjoyed MoS, have seen a few times. I get what people are bitching about. It had its flaws. But the rage is disproportionate this being the fourth origin story over six films. The last one was bunk and while I liked the first to Christopher Reeves ones, they don't hold up. I also don't care much at all about comics, though the brief Return of Superman series was kinda interesting (except for that godawful Steel movie it spawned).

As to the Batman shot now a page back: looked ok. Only thing I don't like is the bat symbol. Don't care what it's evocative of. It looks dumb.

Look, it's really kind of stupid to say, "Oh, man, it's REALISTIC that he just got his powers and he's facing a soldier from his own planet and so it's just so REALISTIC that he would get into a fight and not know what to do and buildings get knocked down and stuff."  This is pretty much from Planet Rob Liefield, where men have steroidal muscles and guns and ladies have no feet, tits the size of an asteroid and waists that make hourglasses look fat. This is where DC Comics as a whole is dialed into right now, looking for guys who think that if comics were REALISTIC there would be more limbs torn off and blood and shit.

Yes, sure, you want to give Superman a dramatic choice. That's the only thing you CAN do with the character. You either need to show how he manages, somehow, to make his way through an impossible dilemma or you need to show him *failing* to do so. But to make him *failing* to do so, you have to establish that he has a track record of NOT failing, that he's a Boy Scout and pure of heart and all that shit. Man of Steel didn't earn that at all. He's got a fuckstupid Pa Kent who doesn't given him any kind of moral compass besides "hide, son, because you're a mutant and the Sentinels are gonna getcha, let me die, I was gonna blow my brains out next week anyway". So there's no dramatic tension here, because this character hasn't been established as anything besides a mopey whiner who wanders around growing his beard and being afraid of everything. Who cares if he destroys half the planet in fighting, we don't really know whether that bothers him or not.

If you want to tarnish the armor, you have to polish it first. This movie couldn't be bothered. Which is going to be the problem with the next one--they're trying to do Miller's Dark Knight (the picture is big big proof of that) without the characters having ANY history with each other. They're using a story as a template that requires the two of them have known each other for decades. This is all tell, no show.

Rage isn't my feeling about MoS. It can best be summed as 'meh'. It had some cool action sequences and moments here and there were good but it just seemed like a miss overall.

The tentacle monsters would find more use in a female captive anyway to breed.

The whole thing is "Oh gee, those new Batman movies are doing well, let's copy that but with Superman."

But that tone doesn't work for a Superman movie. Superman isn't The Dark Knight.

Also, even Batman didn't kill anyone.  Except arguably Dent.  Which, if I remember right, we all didn't like much.

Small aside: I've been reading historical accounts of politics, and it creates this dissonance from the whole "life is precious at any cost" idealism that saturates comic books and most superheroics juxtaposed against this backdrop of men in power routinely sacrificing men and underlings in a cunning bid at some larger scheme. It's anti-politics.

I don't see anywhere that an interpretation of the Superman Story has to be a certain way. What story were they trying to tell using Superman and his mythos as a jumping off point? Did it work for this? In isolation, I saw the film crush itself under its own faulty internal narrative logic and poor execution. It had cool moments and I think good casting in Henry Cavill.

It's a film that is forcibly shoe-horned into a larger franchise (not implying it didn't integrate franchise possibilities from the start), with its own meta-execution issues, as has been repeatedly pointed out. I reserve judgment until I see the execution. DC's track record isn't great, and what the previews they're showing raises artistic concerns, but not business ones. There have been many valid points about DC's difficulties with creating a sustainable movie franchise in this thread compared to the *relative* ease that Marvel has.

Also, regarding Zod's murder: It is frustrating to read that "X character could have done this" -- when every plot has character's actions dictated by the narrative rather than by something a real person would do.

The Superman Story must be about the character of Superman to be a Superman Story. His Boy Scout nature is a cornerstone foundation of that character.  A Superman that has not been established to be so against the loss of any life that he'd go to great extremes to preserve it is simply not a Superman Story. 

Uh, that's the point.  Saying "well, he could have come up with some magical bullshit to defeat Zod without killing him" doesn't do anything.  It's just you sad that Superman had to kill someone in the context of the MoS narrative.  Like it or not (you don't like it) that narrative was about him having to kill Zod or allow Zod to kill him and everyone on the planet.  The film makes it clear this was a last resort and tough a choice.

Superman has killed before, and I think killing someone more powerful than you who is intent on destroying an entire planet is still what a "boy scout" would do if left with no other choice.  We're talking about a boy scout right?  Not Ghandi or some other pacifist?  

The fact that you may be able to extrapolate other half-baked solutions is immaterial.  This isn't real life, the context of the narrative dictated there was no other way.

Even if it was real life, it would be insane to Monday morning quarterback a situation like that.  

>someone more powerful than you who is intent on destroying an entire planet is still what a "boy scout" would do if left with no other choice
Disagree the Zod was more powerful. Zod had more training, Superman had experience. But regardless, beings as powerful as Superman, there are always more choices.

Superman had a temporary advantage that compensated for his zero training in combat.  That temporary advantage was rapidly dissipating, and arguably completely gone by the time Superman killed Zod.  The movie takes great pains to show Zod figuring out how to control new powers one by one.

It would be like a Spartan warrior trained from age seven in the agoge beating your pasty ass in a fist fight.  Not even close.

You're missing the point.  The very fact they made it a dark, gritty movie where superman had no choice goes against the character himself as established in all other forms of media.  It would be like making a strawberry shortcake missing in action movie where she has to liberate P.O.W's from Vietnam.  You could write a narrative to explain that but it would still be dumb.

If you think it's silly that superman would find some magic way out of killing I would even agree since I think superman is a terrible superhero but that's what superman is and I recognize that.

pennyarcadelawsuit.jpg

 :why_so_serious:

The Zod-killing is in any event not the main issue that a lot of people had with the film. The real issue for me and many others was Superman not seeming to give a fuck about collateral damage and about there being tons of collateral damage. That's where "but that's REALISTIC" chafes me the most. Sure, maybe, but if you're going to go there, you should go there all the way, then, like Alan Moore's Miracleman did--you don't get to destroy half a major city and most of a small town in a battle between superpowered titans with alien death machines and then just have everybody kind of shrug it off at the end. One building got destroyed by terrorists in NYC and it sent this country off into a psychotic episode. If you want to go "realism", but then have the people in your realistic world be all, "Oh wells, it's Tuesday, Tuesday is 'Skyscrapers Fall Down Day'", it's just dumb teenage boy realism.

You can have Superman making the difficult choice to kill (and then feeling regret or sadness or trauma about it) if you like--but then treat that like a major dramatic choice and build the whole film around it thematically. MoS doesn't really do that. Compare it to the TV show "Arrow", which has been thinking about the consequences of having a vigilante who kills in a sustained thematic way.

Almost nothing has been set up in MoS that makes a Justice League film make any kind of sense. Do the civilians of MoS seem to live in a world where there are already superheroes? No. But now we're being told, "Oh, Batman, he's been around for a while." Really? And nobody said, "This Superman, he's a costumed guy like that Batman dude, only way stronger." Does it make any sense for costumed heroes to show up now because they're inspired by Superman's example? Fuck no: why would you say, "I want to be like that guy on TV who was involved in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Metropolis! Because he's a hero!" Even if everybody in Earth-ManofSteel says, "Ok, we recognize that he was trying to stop the destruction, that he's basically a good guy", they're still going to associate him with a terrible trauma, his public image is going to be about sadness and fear, not about rescuing kittens or truth and justice.

Is there any basis for superpowers in Earth-MoS except Krypton? No. Cyborg I guess is possible with Luthor's technology, esp. if Luthor gets access to Kryptonian artifacts or tech. Wonder Woman? What, does anyone get the impression there's a secret island of superpowered women in the world of that film? Flash? Green Lantern? No and no. If they have Martian Manhunter I assume they'll do something drastic to distinguish him from Superman, but at least yet another superpowered alien seems somewhat plausible in this universe. Aquaman? Hawkgirl/Hawkman? Right. If there's been a Batman for a decade or more, I guess there could be other street-level vigilantes, but what's the point of throwing them into the JL mix?

I was thinking that when I wrote it. Good eye.

Nobody thinks MoS is a "dark, gritty movie." It's just not campy.

Uhm. Thought that dark and gritty was the whole foundation of the film's cinematography.

The point: This was an origen story.  It established who Superman is.  You CANNOT have the character violate his basic character traits during his origen and have it be that character.  If you establish the exception as part of the general rule, it is not the exception.

Yes, obviously you can have the 'learn from my mistakes' moment which puts a character on a path of redemption.... but that is not Superman's story. 

Superman is the character that was raised right... the paladin... the Boy Scout... He is Truth, Justice and Apple friggin Pie.  He is not just *a* Boy Scout... he is *THE* Boy Scout.  Having a father that tells him to put himself first is not Superman.  Having him be forced to kill Zod during his first true challenge is not Superman.  Those are things that can happen in a hero's story, but not in Superman's story.

The obvious problem: Superman is as boring as they come.  He can't be physically challenged outside of Achilles Heel cheats (which grow boring fast), and that pristine personality is the type of thing that drive most of us crazy when we see it in real life.  You can pull it off with Captain America because there is more to his story and he isn't all powerful.  However, with Superman?  I think the best you can do is introduce him and then use him as a secondary character for other characters to sound off against.  My hope is that the next 2 movies are set up for that use.

I think the movie wanted to be dark and gritty, but there's only so much you can do.  Everything sure was grey and depressing to look at.

Challenges don't make things any better, and it reminds me that my ten-year-old (who doesn't care a lot about comic books or the movies based on them) wanted to know who Superman's nemeses are.  Naturally the first word out of my mouth was Mytzlplyk, or however-the-fuck it is spelled.  That guy isn't grimdark.  It doesn't get much better from there.  Bizarro?

Next two movies?  :awesome_for_real:

Lobo.

Brainiac.  Luthor.  Uhhhmm....

Why not? Superman as he has historically existed is vanilla-boring-overpowered. For MoS (and Supes vs Bat, and the inevitable JL), they decided to reinvent the character and I'm ok with that since I have no preexisting attachment to Superman. I have no problem with people disliking MoS on it's own merits, but "that's not how Superman acts" just comes off as whiny comic nerd. Adaptations are not true to the source material, news at 11.

Doomsday, Solomon Grundy, Darkseid, Metallo, Parasite.

And that's just the ones I remember from the 90's Superman Animated show.