How DC Films Became A Victim Of Constantly Shifting Warner Bros. Leadership

Another day, another speculative update on what is or isn’t happening over at DC Films. Will The Flash get shelved due to the alleged criminal actions of Ezra Miller? Will Walter Hamada stay on as head of the unit past the October 21 release of Black Adam? Why isn’t The Batman 2 officially greenlit yet? Since the coverage of DC Films has been reliable clickbait, at least since 2013, even the absence of news tends to get treated as news. The narrative from the start has been a variation of ‘DC in disarray,’ even when their films eventually started breaking box office records and winning Oscars. However, one of the biggest challenges facing DC has been ever-shifting corporate leadership and corporate mandates, which have kneecapped what was a relative winning streak. Batgirl is a prime example.

The $70 million actioner, starring Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon, was greenlit by AT&T boss Jason Kilar under a specific mandate to offer big-for-streaming HBO Max originals within the DC Films universe. The original sin was arguably the thinking that ‘not a white guy’-led DC superhero movies like Batgirl and Blue Beatle (starring Xolo Maridueña) weren’t automatically worthy of theatrical release. To be fair, Kilar was, like Bob Chapek sending Soul and Turning Red to Disney+, prioritizing streaming over theatrical. But sending minority-led flicks to streaming while letting white guy-led biggies go theatrical made for terrible optics. Kilar’s desire for more HBO Max biggies amid the first year of Covid also led to A) Wonder Woman 1984 getting a hybrid release and B) Zack Snyder getting to make his four-hour version of Justice League.

Covid kneecapped Walter Hamada’s DC winning streak.

Opening Patty Jenkins’ $200 million, IMAX-friendly superhero sequel in theaters and on HBO Max months before Covid vaccines became readily available turned a surefire $650-$850 million box office smash into a commercial flop. It also became the first example of how, when you offer a big-screen epic at home, the social media consensus gets skewed by performative hate-watching from folks who wouldn’t have bothered to see it in theaters. Bringing Zack Snyder’s Justice League to HBO Max for an extra $70 million succeeded in keeping HBO Max in the media but brought the SnyderVerse back to the front of the DC narrative. The media turned Snyder into David against Goliath, forgetting that Man of Steel and Batman v Superman’s divisive reception led to Joss Whedon taking over Justice League and Hamada taking over DC Films.

These choices were due to AT&T’s desire to turn HBO Max into the next Netflix. Throw in the concurrent public downfall of Joss Whedon and Ray Fisher’s allegations of onset/offset abuse and mistreatment by the replacement Justice League director (with Hamada being retroactively established as the metaphorical final boss despite him being at New Line before 2018). You now have a return to the ‘DC in disarray’ narrative even though A) Hamada’s DC Films line-up was mostly successful and B) absent a friggin global pandemic, Wonder Woman 1984 would have been a hit. Likewise, James Gunns’ acclaimed but overbudgeted ($185 million) The Suicide Squad, released in August of 2021 in theaters and on HBO Max amid a Covid resurgence, would have been less of a ‘the sequel pays for the sins of its predecessor’ flop.

Besides, even if The Suicide Squad was always doomed (no Will Smith, no Joker, no Batman = no sale), it was initially supposed to follow Matt Reeves’ surefire hit The Batman in the summer of 2021. In a non-Covid world, the Snyder Cut remains a pipe dream. Meanwhile, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984, The Batman and The Suicide Squad would have represented two years of well-reviewed and well-received DC Films flicks. At least two would have been surefire blockbusters with James Wan’s likely huge Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom following them up in 2022. This would have followed good reviews and solid returns for Aquaman ($1.148 billion), Shazam! (rave reviews and $366 million on a $90 million budget) and Joker (strong reviews, two major Oscars and $1,073 billion worldwide on a $65 million budget).

Discovery’s shifting priorities and Ezra Miller’s alleged misdeeds muddied the waters.

Okay, fine, DC Films lost its post-Justice League momentum thanks to Covid and HBO Max-related circumstances. Theatrical is back, so all should be well, right? In a ‘keep moving forward’ scenario, Matt Reeves’ The Batman ($370 million domestic, the biggest ever for a straight reboot, and $770 million worldwide amid rave reviews) should have marked a new era. It would have been followed by Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam and the Aquaman sequel, with The Flash offering Michael Keaton reprising as Batman and trippy sci-fi time travel fantasy from the director of the It duology opening amid those two. Instead, covid-caused post-production delays sent Black Adam to October and Aquaman 2 to March next year, with The Flash set next June. Meanwhile, new leadership via Discovery’s David Zaslov again turned DC Films into a pinata.

I favor Warner Bros. Discovery prioritizing theatrical over streaming. Films that play in theaters do better on streaming than most non-Netflix streaming originals. I favor not drowning consumers in copious DC Films-related movies and television shows just for the hell of it. Just because you can make a Wonder Twins movie doesn’t mean you should. However, canceling a mostly completed Batgirl movie because it wasn’t good enough and big enough for theaters made for ghoulish optics. In October 2014, casting a quirky-weird, openly queer, Jewish, indie breakout like Ezra Miller as Barry Allen was almost aspirational. In 2022, The Flash is the movie being allowed to open theatrically despite criminal allegations against its white male lead, while the Afrono Latina-led superhero movie (with a significant transgender supporting character) gets buried for a tax break.

Fair or not, what happened to Batgirl (and Scoob: Haunted Holiday) has little to do with The Flash. One was due to shifting priorities that made an allegedly medicore streaming flick damaged goods from a prior regime. The $80 million film likely looked and felt much smaller (thanks to streaming economics where everyone often gets paid upfront and less of the budget goes to the production) than an $80-$110 million theatrical like Shazam, Deadpool 2 or Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s prior flick Bad Boys for Life. The Flash is a $200 million, spectacle-driven fantasy from Andrés Muschietti, whose two It movies earned $1.2 billion on a combined $105 million budget. The not-absurd hope is that global audiences either won’t know who Miller is or won’t care if The Flash is a good movie.

Shifting priorities, and outside circumstances, are the cause of DC Films’ current chaos.

Batgirl got canceled/buried because it was greenlit under a prior regime and its existence was representative of a business strategy that is now 180 degrees from the current priorities. That it allegedly wasn’t very good and wasn’t theatrically ‘big’ amid a skewed window where its budget could be thrown onto AT&T’s books instead of Discovery was the dealbreaker. I disagree with the decision for reasons related to optics, talent relationships and artistic curiosity. However, when everything is content, a partially completed $80 million Batgirl movie is no less expendable than a completed $30 million Games of Thrones prequel pilot. And I strongly disagree with the notion that DC Films needs a new ten-year plan to become more like Marvel, although the ‘make DC like Marvel’ spin may be pessimistic conjecture on my part.

Whatever went wrong with the first batch of DC films, betting the entire universe of a visual dynamo who’s also a genre deconstructionist or panicking when Man of Steel didn’t pull Dark Knight-level grosses and overdosing on Batman, should be treated as history. Bringing on the guy who helped turn The Conjuring into the first fully-functioning, post-Avengers cinematic universe success story ($2.1 billion worldwide on a combined $180 million budget) was a smart play. He helped create diverse, varied DC films of all shapes, sizes and intents that deprioritized connectivity for stand-alone entertainment value. Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam, Joker, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad and The Batman represented precisely the kind of something-for-everyone mentality of a viable cinematic universe. The plan was working right until the world shut down.

Batgirl is an unlikely-to-be-replicated situation. At least Blue Beatle became a theatrical release. Before Covid, DC Films was kicking commercial and critical butt, standing alongside Marvel as a promising slew of rock-solid comic book flicks. DC Films may never have topped Marvel in the zeitgeist, but there was and is value to being Homicide: Life of the Street to Marvel’s Law and Order. The easiest way to ‘fix’ DC Films is to stop trying to fix DC Films and for the industry and the media to acknowledge the outside circumstances of its recent melodramas. The biggest challenge DC faced compared to Marvel, along with Marvel Studios beginning when $449 million for Thor was an unmitigated success, is ever-changing management and corporate priorities. The best thing WBD can do for DC Films is just to leave it alone.