Why Was DC’s SDCC Showing So Weirdly Anemic?

We live in a weird time when at SDCC this past week, The Walking Dead somehow managed to announce bigger news than all of DC and WB. Of course, we knew that Marvel was probably going to continue ruling the show, and they did so laying out more than a dozen movies and shows coming up in Phase 4, 5 and 6 of the MCU, in addition to debuting new blockbuster trailers like Wakanda Forever.

But DC? Things were…quite a bit more sparse.

The two main projects focused on were Black Adam, where marketing for that film has already been in full swing for a while now, given that it will be out in about three months, so there wasn’t anything too wild to see there. And then Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Black Adam’s other side of the coin, had a new trailer to share.

But that was more or less it. Projects we know are coming were conspicuously absent like Aquaman 2 and The Flash, which was likely due to controversies there cast members are embroiled in. That would be Amber Heard, fresh out of the Johnny Depp lawsuit, and Ezra Miller, who has essentially become a Batman villain in Hawaii. It’s possible DC is still deciding what to do with both Meera and Barry Allen overall, or they just didn’t want to showcase either film, as they knew discussion of the actors themselves would consume everything else.

It wasn’t just those projects, though. WB found themselves flung into a weird position when a rumor started circulating that Henry Cavill would show up at the show to announce some sort of return to playing Superman in the DCEU after a long while away. That rumor was just that, a rumor, and as such, they had to suffer from those expectations not coming to fruition, even if it wasn’t a fair expectation in the first place. But it does raise larger questions about the DCEU and where things go from here. No, the “Snyderverse” is never being restored, and yet these are all still Snyder-era characters that continue to exist in parallel to other projects.

And those other, parallel movies? We know The Batman 2 and Joker 2 are both coming, outside the DCEU, and yet neither of these were mentioned at the show even though any info drop about either would have been a huge deal.

On the TV side, DC continues to be kind of all over the place without a unified strategy moving forward. They do have some solid hits, Peacemaker, Doom Patrol and Harley Quinn, but the Arrowverse is dying a painfully horrific death right now, with Legends and Batwoman ending with no real finales, The Flash being dragged through a final season and Superman and Lois pulling an “I don’t know her” with the Arrowverse as it tries to escape it. Then we have odd projects that don’t really fit in anywhere but continue to exist like Titans. We know we’re getting at least one The Batman spin-off starring Penguin but again, it’s a total piñata of content over there these days.

The biggest issue feels like a lack of any kind of coherence. While Marvel may almost be too rigid at times with its MCU structure, DC’s myriad of multiverses mean they’re trying to do both concepts, have the DCEU as a main, shared universe, but also have about five sub-universes that exist on their own planes. And now it’s a problem that some of those worlds are outshining the main one, and you can imagine a situation where they just scrap everything and reboot all of DC to exist in say, the world of The Batman, and start from scratch. It may be getting very near that point, and I don’t think Black Adam and Shazam are going to change anyone’s minds.

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