WB Says They Have Another 10-Year DC Plan, Citing Safe Projects Like ‘The Flash’

The much-hyped WB Discovery earnings call was yesterday, and while the news appeared to be a bit less dire than initially forecast, aka maybe every HBO Max show is not being killed, one thing was made clear. WB is going to really, really try to make its DC content work, and they are now talking about a new “10-year plan” for the DC Universe, citing a model similar to Marvel’s MCU, even though Marvel…never really had a 10 year plan when it started the MCU in the first place.

In the wake of the surprise scrapping of the completed Batgirl movie, WB’s new leadership said they will not put out films they “don’t believe in,” implying that Batgirl was seen as so bad it would damage the DC brand. But if you were wondering if adjacent projects like The Flash would suffer the same fate, that does not appear to be happening.

During the call, Black Adam, Shazam 2 and The Flash were all mentioned as continuing to exist and being projects that were indeed still “believed in.” This is despite Flash star Ezra Miller being currently on the run from the law, leading some to believe that perhaps WB could take an even larger, Batgirl-style writedown if they killed The Flash outright and didn’t release it. That does not appear to be happening.

What is not clear is what exactly the foundation is of DC’s 10-year plan for future content. DC is currently fractured into a number of sub-universes between Titans, Doom Patrol, Superman and Lois, The Batman, Joker and Harley Quinn. The Arrowverse is dead, but the DCEU, the only real connected universe of them all, still lives on, technically, with films like Black Adam, Aquaman 2, The Flash and Shazam 2 still on the way, and through shows like Peacemaker. It is not clear if the overall plan is some big hard reset of the universe to unify everything like the MCU, or if the idea is continuing the DCEU, but with some sort of higher quality bar to better compete with Marvel. As in, not letting Batgirl-like films out the door if they’re going to do more harm than good.

And again, I don’t think it’s correct to say Marvel built the MCU with a grand 10-year plan or even that they plan that far ahead now. The initial assembly of The Avengers took place over a few years, and now, Marvel mostly operates in phases that span usually around one to two years. Yes, they may be more forward thinking now than they used to be, but at this point the MCU has already existed for a decade. With DC, this feels like the second or third time they’ve promised something like this, and yet we remain with a wide smattering of universes of varying quality, and the beleaguered DCEU that does not seem like the correct basis for future DC investment at this point. But we’ll see.

Hopefully this news means more shows get to keep living on, but skepticism is high about what this new regime has planned for DC from here. And there will be plenty of dead projects to come.

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