With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
“You will help them accomplish wonders,” says an image of Jor-El (Russell Crowe). He’s the biological father of Superman (Henry Cavill), and refers to his son’s relationship with humanity in the 2013 film Man Of Steel. Crowe says the line with enough gravitas, and director Zack Snyder frames the moment with enough self-seriousness, for it to avoid coming across as one of those cheesy fourth-wall-breaking promises of exciting franchised adventures to come. But that was nonetheless the idea behind Man Of Steel, which served as the inaugural film of what would come to be known as the DC Extended Universe, an equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from Marvel’s long-standing comic-book rivals. With towering figures like Superman and Wonder Woman at their disposal and comic book movies meeting feverish audience demand, DC was in the position to accomplish wonders. 12 years later, Superman is undergoing another full-universe reboot, and perhaps the greatest wonder of the DCEU is that it actually ended.
Plenty of would-be franchises crash and burn. The superheroes of DC Comics are no stranger to this phenomenon, having previously been torpedoed in two different part fours (Superman IV: The Quest For Peace; Batman & Robin) and plenty of part ones (Green Lantern, somehow released just two years before Man Of Steel). But in the 21st-century Forever Franchise era, the DCEU is probably the biggest series to ever screech to a halt without some specifically designated finale. The closest another series has come is the X-Men progression from Fox, which issued 13 entries over 20 years before being interrupted by a corporate merger (and still appear poised to live through a protracted series of farewells via the mutants’ absorption into the MCU). The DCEU, meanwhile, managed 15 movies over the course of a decade, with a stronger financial batting average, at least in terms of raw grosses. Pre-pandemic, these movies were averaging close to $300 million domestic; across all 15 (which is to say, including their biggest COVID-era flops), they still averaged nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.
It wasn’t enough. That was the story of the DCEU for much of its existence, even when it seemed to be indulging in ill-advised excess. You can watch Man Of Steel succumb to this less-by-way-of-more strategy in real time. Famously promoted (and then, as the years went on, barely mentioned) as a Superman movie made with the blessing of Christopher Nolan in the wake of his Dark Knight trilogy (he shares a story credit), the movie has a strong first hour that does feel like a new writer/artist team taking over a familiar title. It non-chronologically hopscotches through Clark Kent’s pre-history as the last son of Krypton, childhood in Smallville as he grows into his powers, and young adulthood as a super-hobo mentally preparing to introduce himself to the world, all with thought-provoking sensitivity. There are plenty of flourishes that mark it as the clear work of Nolan’s appointed Superman steward Zack Snyder, from the fantasy-cover pulp of Krypton to the bombastic Jesus imagery to reimagining Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) as a man who pragmatically advises his super-son to maybe not save people so much. Yet it also represents some of Snyder’s most disciplined and restrained work as a director, snap zooms and all. Sadly, plot intrudes in the form of fellow Kryptonian General Zod (Michael Shannon) and an eventual punishing battle royale that drags things further into SnyderWorld.
The DCEU’s failure to plant itself in that world in perpetuity would become an object of extreme-minority fanboy controversy for much of the series’ existence. The franchise’s repeated direction-shifting also contributed to the sense that those in charge never exerted full control. (They didn’t even pick their own name; the DCEU was an informal online moniker that stuck.) Rather than raising the intended questions of whether godlike beings can truly expect to shift the moral axis of the world, the DC movies became symbolic of a different, far more quotidian push-pull struggle. They accidentally staged repeated battles between those who advocate for vision-driven filmmakers to put their own stamp on a beloved property in opposition to the soulless suits, and those who crave corporate oversight in the form of a grand and exactingly enforced franchise plan. Sometimes, these are the exact same people.
In his way, Zack Snyder became the perfect figurehead for that incoherent overlap, with his most fervent fans seeing no contradiction between the artistic principle that his vision should be preserved, and the more fascist-adjacent idea that he should exert total control over as many of these movies as possible for as long as he wants. It’s fitting because Snyder is a filmmaker with an immediately recognizable style, sensibility, and set of obsessions; and, simultaneously, he’s an IP-friendly director-for-hire who has been more than willing to play ball with the suits for most of his career. Does the fact that most Snyder movies have a separate director’s cut (or the promise of one) indicate an uncompromising vision that cannot be tamped down, or a filmmaker who makes endless changes based more on momentary whims that can include the demands of corporate higher-ups? (The Rebel Moon movies—which this writer enjoyed more than most people, including some Snyder devotees—seems like proof of the latter.)
But Snyder was never going to direct every DC movie, and a lack of full corporate faith in him following the reception to Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice appeared to embolden the series’ creative diversity even as Snyder himself was stymied. Batman V Superman is a heavily Snyder-stamped movie that also feels like a blatant commercial reaction to Man Of Steel‘s lack of Dark Knight-level cultural saturation: Get Batman in here, stat! And with the Caped Crusader comes Snyder’s vaguely deranged vision of same, not wildly dissimilar to some comics interpretations while never quite escaping the suspicion that Snyder’s two favorite DC superhero properties are his own misreading of The Dark Knight Returns (sitting on his misreading shelf next to Watchmen) and the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us.
Off in this corner of the DCEU, Snyder was finally reaching a breaking point with executives, further exacerbated by a family tragedy that nudged him away from Batman V Superman‘s embattled follow-up Justice League. That film was then blatantly remade in the image of Marvel’s The Avengers by that movie’s pinch-hitting writer-director Joss Whedon, and became a cause célèbre for the aforementioned weirdos who campaigned tirelessly for Snyder’s cut of the film to be released. Eventually that nonexistent cut was completed and premiered on streaming, and though the tone was far more epic pulp than the Saturday morning cartoon version of himself that Whedon copy-of-a-copied for Justice League, it turns out the story was more or less the same. Again, classic Snyder: The longer cuts of Batman V Superman and Justice League make nominally more sense than the cut-down versions, but the net improvements are more a matter of superficial aesthetics than true depth of feeling.
As foolhardy as it might have seemed for this universe to skip straight to its version of The Avengers without doing solo movies for designated team members Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Flash, and Aquaman first, several DC movies made during or immediately following the whole Snyder debacle don’t appear to have been affected. The odd strategy may have actually helped, because the further afield of a big central mission that the DCEU drifted, the more interesting it became. Retroactively, it’s clear the universe contains several fiefdoms: The miniature flamed-out SnyderVerse; the subsequent solo movies of the Justice League heroes, including some of the series’ only traditional sequels; three movies about Harley Quinn and her various squads; three movies focused intensely on the Shazam! mythology; and, uh, one movie about Blue Beetle that narrowly escaped a streaming debut. (Spiritually, it probably belongs with the Shazams.)
Even within those various sub-series, the movies don’t always connect; Wonder Woman and Aquaman don’t have much to do with each other stylistically, linked mainly by their dabbling in Snyder-ish battle tableaux and the director’s admittedly spot-on casting of their leads. More than Snyder’s actual Superman, Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa recall Christopher Reeve by feeling so perfectly suited for these particular parts that it’s easy enough to picture them both failing to ever surpass them in the public imagination. Gadot in particular has since been pilloried for her limited abilities as well as her ties to the IDF, yet a rewatch of Wonder Woman reveals the same guileless charm and chemistry with Chris Pine that made that movie the biggest hit of summer 2017. Her gawky, sometimes awkward sincerity fits fine with the much-maligned sequel Wonder Woman 1984, where director Patty Jenkins does a stronger impression of the original Superman film series than just about anyone actually wanted to see. Similarly, the sequel Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom is so tailored to Momoa’s whole deal (to the point of him sharing a story credit) that it threatens to overdose on his bro-down charm, particularly at the expense of Amber Heard’s Mera, a highlight of the first movie.
These two pairs of superhero movies both feel lopsided toward their fresher first entries, more so now that they’re definitely not completing the standard trilogy-within-the-universe arc that Marvel had with Iron Man and Captain America. Even at their best, Wonder Woman and Aquaman struggle a little with the depiction of larger-than-life superhero exploits that are difficult to depict without slipping into CG action-figure mode. But they both find a way into the mythic sensibility that DC attempted to make its signature. Wonder Woman emphasizes the character’s idealism and unexpected romantic connection with a mere mortal. Aquaman, meanwhile, leans into the aesthetics of actual comics with near-literal splash images that maintain a page-flipping lightness. In very different ways, directors Jenkins and James Wan translate the comic-book sensibility to the big screen more gracefully (and unapologetically) than many of their Marvel counterparts—and at the time, Wonder Woman managed to lap their competitors in the field of constructing a story around a female superhero, despite the MCU’s five-year, seven-movie head start.
While we’re listing ways that the DCEU actually outdid its Marvel rivals, add antiheroes, especially after the series backed away from Snyder’s bizarre conception of Superman as one. Granted, the Suicide Squad movies don’t overflow with genuine transgression; they’re both pretty much “teamwork makes the dream work” cartoons, one hobbled by tinkering and the other enhanced by James Gunn comic grotesquerie. Between those two and the sorta-spinoff Birds Of Prey, however, the DCEU offers a genuinely conflicted heroine, and another perfect match of performer and role, with Margot Robbie’s whimsically unbalanced Harley Quinn. For comics nerds and/or anyone exhausted by endless Joker Mystique, the fact that Harley had a more prominent onscreen role in this cycle of DC movies than the Clown Prince Of Crime is a delightful accident of fate or, more specifically, of Jared Leto being totally insufferable.
Meanwhile, the increasingly insufferable Dwayne Johnson had his own idea about how to accomplish wonders, and wound up attempting to grab the DCEU steering wheel with Black Adam, which has real beginning-of-the-end vibes despite being watchably colorful junk. By any reasonable standard, the character Black Adam, who is basically Murder Shazam, should have been the sympathetic yet fearsome villain for a sequel to Shazam!, which is the most blatantly Marvelesque of the DC movies apart from the Whedon version of Justice League. The reason for the upgrade to film-leading character was not Harley Quinn-style popularity; Johnson had been dying to play the character for ages, and turned this desire into an unwieldy combo of passion project and star vehicle. Weirdly, Black Adam mirrors Man Of Steel well before Johnson calls Henry Cavill out of de facto retirement for a mid-credits tease of a match-up between the two biggest DC characters: Superman, and, uh, Black Adam. It tells an elaborate origin story that descends into endless CG punching, with its primary auteur—that would be Johnson, not poor director Jaume Collet-Serra—somehow both restraining himself and hoping to remake the whole enterprise in his image. Johnson clearly thought he belatedly could serve as the series’ Robert Downey Jr., and somehow leapfrog Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Ben Affleck in the process.
Black Adam attempts to continue the Shazam! movies’ meta elements, establishing the DC world as one where kids really are fans of the (“real”) superheroes from the Justice League; the audience proxy in Black Adam totes around a backpack full of actual DC comic books. Marvel has gone to this well too, and there’s room for a DC version where super-powered beings make the fandom more like a religion. (Sound familiar?) Yoking that fandom to Johnson’s world-beating star persona, though, reduces those central DCEU struggles over the wielding of vast power (and living up to mortal-world ideals) into a lengthy and shockingly anti-dramatic flex. The charges that Superman is too all-powerful to be interesting don’t apply to Man Of Steel, but they sure apply to Black Adam.
It’s not necessarily fair to accuse Johnson of poisoning the DC well. Technically, he shepherded the DCEU’s biggest movie since Aquaman, and its only post-pandemic title to do Marvel-level business in this country. (More Eternals than Shang-Chi, but still.) Yet something was clearly amiss—ineffably Not Enough—as the series entered its fire-sale phase. Black Adam kicked off a 14-month period, exacerbated by various pandemic-related delays, where a whopping five DCEU movies came to theaters. Though none of them are all that bad or inexplicable viewed individually, in concert they finally convert the series’ whatever-works approach into genuine flailing.
Though third-to-last by release date, it’s The Flash that feels like the DCEU running itself into the ground with an accidental series finale, again circling back to Man Of Steel with a time-travel story centered on the Speed Zone-accessing Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) trying to save his dad and realigning the entire universe in the process. Again, on its own, some of this stuff is pretty clever; there’s a certain anything-goes quality to a janky skeleton-crew superteam that includes Barry Allens from two different timelines, the Michael Keaton version of Batman, and a Supergirl variant on Superman. But the movie’s excitable all-in attempt to mount a DC version of the Avengers: Endgame portal sequence, with a truly misguided attempt at paying tribute to all the multiversal Supermen (and other heroes) who came before, warps an otherwise thematically impressive climax about the mania of fixating on the past. After watching Miller distorted by his CG Flash outfit and a virtual Keaton zipping around the frame suspiciously quickly, the corpses zapped back to life through CG lightning function as an apex of the DCEU’s distaste for sustained exposure to actual human bodies.
Given the series’ inconsistency, that uncertainty over how to depict a body that is both tactile and godlike doesn’t pervade every movie. Robbie gives a boldly physical performance across three appearances as Harley, locating dynamic comics-like poses and rarely if ever looking as if she’s being swapped out for a digital stunt double. (That thing where she wriggles out of complicated bindings in The Suicide Squad is evidently real, or about as real as these things get.) Those are certainly the real Cavill and Amy Adams clinching in the tub in Batman V Superman, a too-rare moment of genuine sex appeal in a superhero movie. And Momoa’s looseness as a performer (and his obviously anti-Dwayne Johnson approach to endlessly polishing an impossible physique) informs his portrayal of Aquaman, even if plenty of supersuited moments blur the line between human and digital. Still, it’s surprising how often the series returns to a Green Lantern sheen of digitally painted-on muscles and logos, despite the agreed-upon failure of that 2011 nonstarter, creating some accidental body horror along the way. Making several very good superhero movies only gave the DCEU the confidence to make more, not to make them better, and The Flash can be easily read as an allegory for the DC movie machine itself, endlessly fussing with its formulas in hope of creating something more perfectly calibrated to make magically maximized revenue.
For all that, in terms of dollars and eyeballs, the DCEU is the second-most successful Cinematic Universe project of its era, dwarfed by Marvel yet never inspiring a movie as dull as that Captain America fourquel. When the DCEU movies are bad, they play like bad comics; when the MCU movies are bad, they play like bad TV. DC’s true fate has been to lose a public-relations war not just to the MCU, but other Warner Bros. series that started around the same time; the Conjuring-verse and the Monsterverse have both managed to last longer on fewer entries (and, presumably, lower average budgets).
But 10 years is an eternity of continuity in comic-book world, where abrupt pivots don’t attract quite so much attention. In this way, the DCEU may be the most comics-accurate superhero franchise ever attempted. These 15 movies faithfully recreate the experience of sifting through interconnected but sometimes unrelated comics, looking for something more sublime, moving, or exciting than the standard-issue pulp adventures. At the movies, though, accomplishing those wonders is an even more difficult task. If the DCEU made the effort a little more visible, a little more rubbery in its attempt to depict towering heroes and antiheroic weirdos, maybe that was also its addictive superpower—a promise that missteps didn’t spell franchise doom, and that heroes were still subject to some unpredictability. Anyone could make a good Wolverine movie. But Aquaman? For a series sometimes found wanting in the area of down-to-earth humanity, its ignominious end reinforced that vulnerability. Franchises aren’t meant to last forever. Eventually—whether you grow up, change your taste, run out of money, or stick with a reboot until the next one takes over—the pages stop turning.
Final ranking:
1. Wonder Woman (2017)
2. Aquaman (2018)
3. The Suicide Squad (2021)
4. Birds Of Prey, Or The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn (2020)
5. Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
6. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom (2023)
7. Shazam! (2019)
8. The Flash (2023)
9. Man Of Steel (2013)
10. Justice League (2017/2021)
11. Suicide Squad (2016)
12. Blue Beetle (2023)
13. Black Adam (2022)
14. Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (2023)
15. Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice (2016)
