Movies Batgirl: $90 Million Dollar Movie Cancelled

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
The only DC movies not screwed up before release seem to be the Lego Batman movie. Why is that?
From my limited perspective, they're making a large number of mistakes that are mostly caused by excessive impatience and greed.

Their "original sin" from which all others spring is trying to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Copying in movies and jumping on the bandwagon is generally the act of an inferior trying to ride a superior's coattails, not the act of a peer. "The copy is always inferior to the original" is a truism for a reason. Moreover, the MCU was lightning in a bottle, nobody has ever pulled off such a feat before and nobody has managed to duplicate it. I'm of the opinion that we won't see the like again for decades.

As a second sin caused by greed and impatience, they didn't even copy the MCU right. The MCU got a very clever start by making good standalone movies that didn't rely on interactions with each other, and only after several such successes did they release Avengers and tie things together. The DC copy tried to jump right into the crossovers, with Man of Steel and then straight to Batman vs. Superman with no Batman or Wonder Woman films released before that to establish the characters, and no standalone films to build the hype and interest the way the MCU did first. By contrast, the MCU had two Ironman movies, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America establishing each of those characters well before Avengers came along, and all those movies could stand on their own.

Possibly due to the rush job, they didn't leverage their IP very well and copied Marvel themes that don't work for DC. Marvel and DC don't really trade in the same type of stories. Marvel is much more prone to anti-heroes and shades of grey, with many characters changing sides regularly. Most Marvel heroes are deeply flawed and most of their villains actually have a point. DC is far more black and white with their heroes being more noblebright and their villains being more grimdark. To be sure that doesn't mean there are no exceptions at all, Captain America and Spider-Man are quite noblebright and a few Batman villains verge on antivillain status. However, overall, it's hard to find a Marvel Villain as utterly without redeeming qualities as the Joker, or a Marvel Hero as incorruptible as The Flash.

DC abandoned this when they made the DC Movies, they tried to make them all shades of grey and turn the heroes into anti-heroes more akin to Marvel characters, warts and all. But Superman doesn't have warts. There was a lot of controversy about Superman killing Zod, or Batman using a red-hot bat symbol to brand his targets with a scar that would mark them for elimination by other criminals. These aren't DC-type stories about heroes doing the wrong thing for the right reason, these are Marvel-type stories. Superman and Batman don't kill, don't maim, don't permanently scar and have others do the dirty work for them.

Due to the aforementioned mimicry and greed issues, they released too many characters too quickly. Batgirl? We haven't even had a Batman movie yet (aside from crossovers) to establish him for her to imitate! Note too that traditionally, Batgirl is the harbinger of the Apocalypse for the Batman franchise. Typically once she's added, the character bloat has gotten too large and the show suffers for it. The Batman avoided this by introducing her as the first sidekick before Robin appeared but it still eventually suffered from the Bat family getting too large. We had Justice League before there was an Aquaman, Shazam, or Flash movie to establish those characters, Suicide Squad with tons of villains a lot of people had no idea about, Birds of Prey without a Huntress or Black Canary movie for their main characters, etc. Too much rush, too slow.

Finally, they've had much more push to be woke, in part because the MCU came out earlier before this movement got traction. Quite ironically, the DCU should have had a significant edge here, DC has many more memorable female and/or minority heroes and villains than Marvel and including Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman in their first few movies was enough to put them well ahead of Marvel, but it's never enough. They got dragged down trying to push ultra-intersectional Batwoman, using wokeness as a substitute for minor things like plot, and had to release Batgirl before Batman to get those extra woke points. But woke points don't make bad movies good and Twitter posts don't put dollars in the box office.

DC and Marvel have a tendency to swap who's ahead over the years. Back when the DCAU was a thing it was vastly superior, and Marvel's attempts to copy it in their own cartoons was laughable. Today Marvel's well ahead and DC's scrambling to build their own Cinematic Universe is also laughable. Ultimately, the copy can never beat the original but, unfortunately, we don't always have original thinkers in charge and sometimes the bosses just try to plagiarize someone better out of greed and impatience for more money right now.
 

Tyzuris

Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
From my limited perspective, they're making a large number of mistakes that are mostly caused by excessive impatience and greed.

Their "original sin" from which all others spring is trying to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Copying in movies and jumping on the bandwagon is generally the act of an inferior trying to ride a superior's coattails, not the act of a peer. "The copy is always inferior to the original" is a truism for a reason. Moreover, the MCU was lightning in a bottle, nobody has ever pulled off such a feat before and nobody has managed to duplicate it. I'm of the opinion that we won't see the like again for decades.

As a second sin caused by greed and impatience, they didn't even copy the MCU right. The MCU got a very clever start by making good standalone movies that didn't rely on interactions with each other, and only after several such successes did they release Avengers and tie things together. The DC copy tried to jump right into the crossovers, with Man of Steel and then straight to Batman vs. Superman with no Batman or Wonder Woman films released before that to establish the characters, and no standalone films to build the hype and interest the way the MCU did first. By contrast, the MCU had two Ironman movies, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America establishing each of those characters well before Avengers came along, and all those movies could stand on their own.

Possibly due to the rush job, they didn't leverage their IP very well and copied Marvel themes that don't work for DC. Marvel and DC don't really trade in the same type of stories. Marvel is much more prone to anti-heroes and shades of grey, with many characters changing sides regularly. Most Marvel heroes are deeply flawed and most of their villains actually have a point. DC is far more black and white with their heroes being more noblebright and their villains being more grimdark. To be sure that doesn't mean there are no exceptions at all, Captain America and Spider-Man are quite noblebright and a few Batman villains verge on antivillain status. However, overall, it's hard to find a Marvel Villain as utterly without redeeming qualities as the Joker, or a Marvel Hero as incorruptible as The Flash.

DC abandoned this when they made the DC Movies, they tried to make them all shades of grey and turn the heroes into anti-heroes more akin to Marvel characters, warts and all. But Superman doesn't have warts. There was a lot of controversy about Superman killing Zod, or Batman using a red-hot bat symbol to brand his targets with a scar that would mark them for elimination by other criminals. These aren't DC-type stories about heroes doing the wrong thing for the right reason, these are Marvel-type stories. Superman and Batman don't kill, don't maim, don't permanently scar and have others do the dirty work for them.

Due to the aforementioned mimicry and greed issues, they released too many characters too quickly. Batgirl? We haven't even had a Batman movie yet (aside from crossovers) to establish him for her to imitate! Note too that traditionally, Batgirl is the harbinger of the Apocalypse for the Batman franchise. Typically once she's added, the character bloat has gotten too large and the show suffers for it. The Batman avoided this by introducing her as the first sidekick before Robin appeared but it still eventually suffered from the Bat family getting too large. We had Justice League before there was an Aquaman, Shazam, or Flash movie to establish those characters, Suicide Squad with tons of villains a lot of people had no idea about, Birds of Prey without a Huntress or Black Canary movie for their main characters, etc. Too much rush, too slow.

Finally, they've had much more push to be woke, in part because the MCU came out earlier before this movement got traction. Quite ironically, the DCU should have had a significant edge here, DC has many more memorable female and/or minority heroes and villains than Marvel and including Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman in their first few movies was enough to put them well ahead of Marvel, but it's never enough. They got dragged down trying to push ultra-intersectional Batwoman, using wokeness as a substitute for minor things like plot, and had to release Batgirl before Batman to get those extra woke points. But woke points don't make bad movies good and Twitter posts don't put dollars in the box office.

DC and Marvel have a tendency to swap who's ahead over the years. Back when the DCAU was a thing it was vastly superior, and Marvel's attempts to copy it in their own cartoons was laughable. Today Marvel's well ahead and DC's scrambling to build their own Cinematic Universe is also laughable. Ultimately, the copy can never beat the original but, unfortunately, we don't always have original thinkers in charge and sometimes the bosses just try to plagiarize someone better out of greed and impatience for more money right now.
Yeah this post puts it quite well. DCEU has never had the same amount of effort behind it as MCU has and as a result has tried to get a cheap win by imitating MCU with much poorer result.

Because to paraphrase a Finnish saying, running while pissing produces messy outcomes.
 

Buba

A total creep
1 - when I was young(ish) bad movies were called "straight to video". This is no longer used? Or was the OP movie that bad?

2 - unredemable Joker?
A few years ago my son, who has a stake in the Batman franchise (unlike me) took me the cinema to a boring woke movie about a pre-Joker clown-for-hire Joker.
He was beaten up by young inner city thugs - "poow leedle things know no better, it's OK" - but when same was done to him by white upper class dudes in their 20s he killed them.
And he took care of his crazy and disable Mum.
And fantasised about boinking a single-mom mulatta ...

It was the 3rd* movie in my life I did not watch at the cinema until the end but got up and left. It felt very long

* I admit I sat out a few howlers - I'm a bit ashamed that the number of movies I regret watching and should had walked is not pushing ten. Sunk cost fallacy ...
 
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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
1 - when I was young(ish) bad movies were called "straight to video". This is no longer used? Or was the OP movie that bad?
Not really a thing anymore, now it's direct to streaming as people simply don't buy much DVDs anymore. But then COVID came and shut down theatres so even A-list movies started going direct to streaming so it's pretty muddled.
 

The Original Sixth

Well-known member
Founder
From my limited perspective, they're making a large number of mistakes that are mostly caused by excessive impatience and greed.

Their "original sin" from which all others spring is trying to copy the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Copying in movies and jumping on the bandwagon is generally the act of an inferior trying to ride a superior's coattails, not the act of a peer. "The copy is always inferior to the original" is a truism for a reason. Moreover, the MCU was lightning in a bottle, nobody has ever pulled off such a feat before and nobody has managed to duplicate it. I'm of the opinion that we won't see the like again for decades.

I'm gonna disagree somewhat.

1) DC's Darknight was an 08 movie and Iron Man, who really kicked off the MCU, was also an 08 movie. They were both trying to sell superhero movies. The primary difference was that the MCU had a grand vision of interweaving stories that built up to a grand finale. DC lacked that, but from what I remember, they were actually doing well.

2) Where DC went wrong was in both execution and timing. Avengers came out in 2012, 4 year after Iron Man.

2) DC really started to copy the MCU in 2013 with MoS, followed by Batman vs Superman in 2016, and Justice League in 2017. Keep in mind the Avengers came out in 2012. Four years after Iron Man, they had the Avengers. MoS came out in 2013 and the Justice League came out in 2017. So they had the timeframe there, but there seems to be a problem in the execution. I don't know why they did Batman vs Superman...it was honestly a dumb idea to introduce Batman by pitting him against Superman.

3) The DCCU execution ranges from 'good' to 'really bad'. The MCU was actually really good when it started. They put out Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. I know Iron Man and Captain America were good. I never saw Hulk, but he only got one standalone, so I guess he wasn't doing well. Thor has gotten four movies, so he must be doing solid numbers. Iron Man II helped bring it all together for the Avengers. The DCCU had Superman (good start), Batman vs Superman (...why?), Wonder Woman, Justice League (same year? Bad idea...) and only after Justice League did they start to make movies for the others.

On top of that, the DCCU seemed to be wanting to go for darker and edgier, which isn't the formula that made the MCU so popular.

4) The timing is poor. Superhero movies took off around 2008, but they'd been around for over a decade before. But 2008 was the point where it had hit its stride when Marvel found the proper mix for a superhero movie to draw in large crowds. But the DCCU was floundering with their turkey movies in 2017...shortly after Age of Ultron and Civil War, but just before Infinity War. The super hero movie franchise, I would argue, was reaching its climax.

5) The DCCU is continuing to try and catch up to the MCU, that they're skipping the awesome major story arc (seemingly) and going right to the "shitty diversity sequels" that no one likes.
 

Free-Stater 101

Freedom Means Freedom!!!
Nuke Mod
Moderator
Staff Member
I honestly think the DCCU needs to be completely scrapped, it would be better if they wait five or ten years before starting again from the ground up. The MCU has since peaked with Endgame and a decade from now the public will be wanting something new and fresh.
 
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Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Interesting to see Hollywood realizes that for once, it does not need to adhere to the sunk cost fallacy and dump hundreds of millions into marketing a movie that is going to flop. They can cut the knot beforehand. Let's see if Hollywood realizes that they can prevent these disasters at the planning the stage.


4PO7sAO.jpg


Honestly, the cape genre has been a dead for over 30 years. No one reads the comics anymore. The actual comic companies of Marvel and DC are just kept alive for Hollywood to license the brand recognition of the IPs. They're just rehashing the same tired old story over and over and over again. The MCU wasn't popular because people like superheroes; it was popular because it was the summer action flicks that people were presented with the choice of watching.
 
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Culsu

Agent of the Central Plasma
Founder
And now ironically Ezra Miller's The Flash movie was (is?) supposed the start of a reboot of the whole DCEU.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
Interesting to see Hollywood realizes that for once, it does not need to adhere to the sunk cost fallacy and dump hundreds of millions into marketing a movie that is going to flop. They can cut the knot beforehand. Let's see if Hollywood realizes that they can prevent these disasters at the planning the stage.


4PO7sAO.jpg

This reminds me...

Remember when Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie had Ozymandias wipe out not just New York City but like thirty or something major cities and make it look like Dr. Manhattan had done it (which actually makes more thematic sense then the original comic book series) and somehow it was far, far, far, far, far less emotionally impactful and resonant then the Comic showing random ass squid alien belly flopped on some building surrounded by a bloody corpse laden street filled with background characters and nobodies?

They basically had a better idea, and made the atrocity and climax even more epic in scale... and it landed with a bare fraction of the impact of the original comics ending. I say this as a fan of most of the film as being a pretty terrific adaption of Watchmen.

Maybe there's a metaphor for Snyderverse/DCCU in there or something... I dunno. :p
 

The Original Sixth

Well-known member
Founder
Interesting to see Hollywood realizes that for once, it does not need to adhere to the sunk cost fallacy and dump hundreds of millions into marketing a movie that is going to flop. They can cut the knot beforehand. Let's see if Hollywood realizes that they can prevent these disasters at the planning the stage.


4PO7sAO.jpg


Honestly, the cape genre has been a dead for over 30 years. No one reads the comics anymore. The actual comic companies of Marvel and DC are just kept alive for Hollywood to license the brand recognition of the IPs. They're just rehashing the same tired old story over and over and over again. The MCU wasn't popular because people like superheroes; it was popular because it was the summer action flicks that people were presented with the choice of watching.

I don't think that's true.

I think this basically comes in two forms.

You had the early superhero movies, like Superman and Batman, which did alright, but let's be honest, you can't really do the super awesome stuff that makes them seem like actual superheroes with the technology of 1970s and 1980s. And that was a massive leap over the technologies of the 1950s. 2002 was when the Spiderman came out, which really gave super hero movies a shot in the arm. You had some following crap movies for about 5 years after that, with some wins (Batman Begins), but it wasn't until 2008 that you saw things like the Dark Knight and Iron Man that really changed the game.

And I'll hand it to Disney, they were able to stretch that out till 2019. That's about 11 years. About a decade of constant wins in terms of profits, growing fan base and expanding markets. The problem that Disney has run into is multi-fold. First, the loss of DVD sales has basically halved what the studios could rely upon for profits. That has put hard limits on what studios are willing to experiment with and so you see a lot of studios chasing trends; the whole SJW woke thing I think is fueled by that anxiety.

The second is we're facing a demographic collapse in various modern economies, which have the most disposable income; China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, and all of Europe. On top of that, countries like Russia and China are either on their way out of accepting international films or are already out. There's a reason why studios like Marvel go the extra mile to get releases in China, Saudi Arabia, and other parts of the world.

The third is that at the same time these are all collapsing, the Hero genre is not only overplayed but Hollywood is now riddled with leftist writers and ideology. So not only are people done seeing the Avengers, they're now being lectured by the knock-off Avengers. So you see a lot of them trying to branch out into other popular media. The Rings of Power, the House of the Dragon, and all those Netflix Anime adaptions are all a part of that. Although, specifically for Netflix, it was because Disney yanked their Superhero shows.

To sumerize; Hollywood is facing a smaller (and ever-shrinking) market, genre exhaustion, and their writer pool consists of leftist ideologues who will set the mob upon anyone who tries to take a new course during a time of heightened American polarization.

They're probably all just fucked.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
mabye so but this is a chance for some one to create new insitutions outside of hollywood.
Exceedingly difficult. Hollywood is thoroughly entrenched in the political machine to protect itself. Further everything in entertainment is unionized and anybody not part of the union will get nowhere. That's one reason you tend to run into such weird union jokes in movies and TV shows, every single job in entertainment is thoroughly unionized and they're all used to seeing unionized everything.

The unions have so much power that George Lucas couldn't get help on Star Wars films due to not being a member of the Directors Guild. Screenwriters and directors felt that having their name attached to Star Wars would be a career killer if their union blacklisted them for it. If even he couldn't hire people due to guild interference? Yeah, without Union Busting from the government, absolutely nobody will be able to make new institutions outside of Hollywood.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
Exceedingly difficult. Hollywood is thoroughly entrenched in the political machine to protect itself. Further everything in entertainment is unionized and anybody not part of the union will get nowhere. That's one reason you tend to run into such weird union jokes in movies and TV shows, every single job in entertainment is thoroughly unionized and they're all used to seeing unionized everything.

The unions have so much power that George Lucas couldn't get help on Star Wars films due to not being a member of the Directors Guild. Screenwriters and directors felt that having their name attached to Star Wars would be a career killer if their union blacklisted them for it. If even he couldn't hire people due to guild interference? Yeah, without Union Busting from the government, absolutely nobody will be able to make new institutions outside of Hollywood.

you have people making their own flims on tiny budgets and then streaming them out.

Green screen technology has gotten so cheap randos can use it. Technology is going to kill that monopoly.
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
At this point, it's just going to take some people getting together to form a new studio somewhere that is not in California. It could literally be anywhere. They could try crowd sourcing, too, as this has worked for people to get their comics published outside of the big companies in the past.
 

The Whispering Monk

Well-known member
Osaul
And then there's Angel Studios, home of The Chosen series. Which is the story of Christ and his disciples. Crowd funding to hire, produce, direct and distribute.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
you have people making their own flims on tiny budgets and then streaming them out.

Green screen technology has gotten so cheap randos can use it. Technology is going to kill that monopoly.
YouTube is already visibly moving to crack down on such content and prevent it from working against that monopoly. Their algorithms are selecting against those streams and demonetizing them. Any indie movement that actually wants to beat Hollywood is going to have to beat Big Tech, Big Government, and scads of other Big Money interests first, who want to protect their propaganda department.
 

WolfBear

Well-known member


Apparently, after finishing the movie, the test audiences found it so bad that they calculated, that the release wouldn't even cover the cost of distribution.


Frankly, a good way to attract people to a movie is to make at least one of the main characters extremely hot. I know that I myself am much more likely to watch something if it has a hot character in it.

This might sound cynical and anti-feminist, but it is what it is. People like watching hotties.
 

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