Originally Posted by Jeff Harris
Seventy years ago, Superman, the first modern superhero, was introduced in the first issue of Action Comics.
Yes, there were heroes created before the Man of Steel (The Phantom, Zorro, and Doc Savage immediately come to mind), but there was something about the character that connected with the populace. When Dave Fleischer approached National Publications about transforming their marquee character into an animation superstar, no one suspected that they would create a genre, the action-animation series. Through the years, Superman, Batman, and a very select few of the characters owned by DC Comics, the comics giant created from the combination of National Publications, All American Comics, and the libraries of Fawcett, Charlton, and Wildstorm, have been seen in theaters and television sets in many forms for nearly 70 years. And it's always been largely Batman and Superman.
Seventy years have passed, and I fear many things. Today, I fear what DC Comics will do to the sequel of The Dark Knight. It'll be a third movie, and historically, third movies don't really do that well (that's a conversation for another time). The Dark Knight transformed the mythos of the Batman comic book property from a superhero story to a psychological crime drama, creating what could considered the best picture of the year. Before The Dark Knight came out, one other superhero film had that kind of credibility and legitimate praise.
It was Iron Man.
Iron Man was the perfect superhero movie, and in its essence, it still is. However, The Dark Knight also radicalized the genre beyond pointless brawls, loud, flashy outfits, stilted dialogue, and obnoxious, hammy villains. Both Iron Man and The Dark Knight brought superhero films to a human level creating nearly possible scenarios for items that could happen in the real world. Or, at least, you can imagine them.
Iron Man is just one of many films in development at Marvel Studios. The Dark Knight is the latest to come out from Warner Bros.
What's wrong with that last paragraph? Iron Man is a production of Marvel Studios. The Dark Knight is a production of Legendary Pictures, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, and based on a property owned by DC Comics. There is no DC Comics Studios. There will probably never be one. DC Comics only got the on-screen vanity card acknowledgement from Warner Bros. over three years ago when Batman Begins opened. There is no coherent plan at DC Comics as long as Warner Bros. continues to dominate the culture and the direction of anything based on any DC Comics title beyond the printed pages.
And while Marvel Comics has already evolved into Marvel Entertainment expanding their dominion beyond the comics and into everything from movies to television shows (and not just animated series), DC Comics is still holding the hand of Warner Bros. and afraid to cross even a small corner without them. They've only realized they need to catch up with Marvel when everybody has publicly said that. DC has come a long way, but they've got a long way to go, and in their current state, it could take longer than it should.