WI: DC decides to use the Dark Knight Trilogy as a springboard...

For their cinematic universe? After the success of the Dark Knight and let's say Heath Ledger did not pass away and they decide (With some obvious revisions) to have the Green Lantern movie take part in the same world as the Dark Knight.
 
Marvel Studios had a plan from the get go to build a common cinematic universe. The stories and villains they picked were designed to work together in greater stories that eventually built into crossover/team movies.

DC can do the same, but they need an overarching strategy. The problem is that while Marvel Studios had only their comic book properties, Time Warner is gigantic - DC comics is only a small bit, and Warner Brothers is its own operating company. You need someone with both the vision and power at Warner Brothers (or Time Warner who can tell WB what to do) to develop a plan rather than simply letting independent producers latch onto particular characters and develop them separately. Ideally, someone really likes Bruce Timm's Justice League cartoons which built on the previous Batman and Superman animated series and decides "this is how we want do it" and then works with Christopher Nolan to fit his movies into the scheme.

That means you want the same kind of "feel" in all your movies which isn't "dark", but "realistic and dramatic". You want the same tone to be appear in Green Lantern so that when you finally team up Batman and the Justice League, it can be accepted as being in the same universe despite their very different milieus.

If you can get the same tone in all the movies, and if you have an overall plot that connects all your franchises, then you can do it. But in order to do that, you need a very powerful champion at the top of a huge corporation like Time Warner.
 
Marvel Studios had a plan from the get go to build a common cinematic universe. The stories and villains they picked were designed to work together in greater stories that eventually built into crossover/team movies.

DC can do the same, but they need an overarching strategy. The problem is that while Marvel Studios had only their comic book properties, Time Warner is gigantic - DC comics is only a small bit, and Warner Brothers is its own operating company. You need someone with both the vision and power at Warner Brothers (or Time Warner who can tell WB what to do) to develop a plan rather than simply letting independent producers latch onto particular characters and develop them separately. Ideally, someone really likes Bruce Timm's Justice League cartoons which built on the previous Batman and Superman animated series and decides "this is how we want do it" and then works with Christopher Nolan to fit his movies into the scheme.

That means you want the same kind of "feel" in all your movies which isn't "dark", but "realistic and dramatic". You want the same tone to be appear in Green Lantern so that when you finally team up Batman and the Justice League, it can be accepted as being in the same universe despite their very different milieus.

If you can get the same tone in all the movies, and if you have an overall plot that connects all your franchises, then you can do it. But in order to do that, you need a very powerful champion at the top of a huge corporation like Time Warner.

You raised an interesting point. While there is the obvious source material in the comics, I always found that the animations would serve a more useful purpose for the building of a coherent "shared universe", because the animated series, like Batman's or Superman 90's cartoon had their own contained story arches, without necessarily falling into the intricated continuity problems of the comics counterparts.

The Spider-Man 90's cartoon is a good example: it had self contained, original story arches, which had origin or inspiration from the comics, but followed their own purposes.

This is the kind of model the Cinematic Universe could look shape itself, albeit on a movie-scale.
 
Marvel and D.C. are not the same-and Marvel historically has been more interested in developing a cohesive universe for the company's characters. Marvel also developed it's cohesive universe organically-beginning with a more or less consistent creative team-where what became the D.C. universe began with a series of cross-overs.

In the early days-yes there was World's Finest-a running cross-over book between Batman and Superman-but in the regular books the world of Gotham and Metropolis did not interact on a regular basis in the same way the world of the original Human Torch and the Submariner did.

The D.C. Animated Universe arguably followed the Marvel model-in that you had a more or less consistent creative team building up its world gradually and organically.

But that's an exception to how D.C. Comics developed from what I know-and how a unified universe would likely emerge.

As Batman v. Superman indicates-D.C. is likely to do the opposite of what Marvel did. Start with a massive crossover and then branch off franchises.

Marketing at D.C. would never allow this-but I think the best thing for a D.C. universe would be to keep Batman out of it.

Batman's presence hurts both him and the other characters who would make up a D.C. Cinematic Universe. It hurts him because the presence of a character like Superman seems to make him redundant-which in turn can create a scenario he's either superfluous or more superhuman than Clark Kent. Either way-one of the characters suffer.

Even with Batman Begins-it's hard to unite Nolan's world-fantastic though it is-with a world that can include a character like Superman. So the idea of beginning the D.C. Universe with Nolan is problematic for that reason alone.
 
You raised an interesting point. While there is the obvious source material in the comics, I always found that the animations would serve a more useful purpose for the building of a coherent "shared universe", because the animated series, like Batman's or Superman 90's cartoon had their own contained story arches, without necessarily falling into the intricated continuity problems of the comics counterparts.
i agree. the DCAU would actually be a good model to work on: make movies based on biggest and most marketable heroes--namely Batman and Superman, and maybe a few others (obviously, Green Lantern comes to mind since they made a movie starring him, and Flash could be another) and then make a Justice League movie which explicitly bridges them. it could even have a base set-up like the first two episodes of Justice League: ruins are found on Mars which are used as a covert invasion by aliens, Martian Manhunter is captured and brought to Earth, and during the first 30-45 minutes of the movie we're also introduced to Wonder Woman and maybe Hawkgirl (or Hawkman or some other well-known DC hero, maybe Aquaman) who then team up to fight the villains

however, i think it would probably be better if it was a more iconic alien threat which is used. which one immediately comes to mind, and who would already be established by a previous movie? well, several, actually, since both Superman and Green Lantern are explicitly associated with as many alien as earthly threats, but the ones that immediately come to mind for me are Darkseid and Brainiac, though i think Brainiac would make the best one, especially if he was introduced in the prologue to the Superman movie and, much like in Superman: The Animated Series, appeared in the stinger for the movie as having been recovered by random aliens (or maybe even a couple of unimportant Green Lanterns to bridge it with that other movie early on) to show that he survived the destruction of Krypton.

another bridging moment could be in a Batman movie which maybe has Lex Luthor briefly appear, meeting with Bruce Wayne (maybe he's on his way out as Alfred walks in to tell Bruce something) some other possibilities would simply be to imply possible movies or other team-ups like what the MCU did at the end of Age of Ultron, not only introducing a few new Avengers just before the climax but also explicitly showing some at the end even though they had no major role, namely the Falcon. a Justice League movie could do this with some lesser-known but still-recognizable characters like Green Arrow, Black Canary, Vixen, Doctor Fate, maybe Blue Beetle or even Nightwing (if they decided to introduce Dick Grayson in his own movie and have one of the other Robins in a later Batman movie--it could even be Jason Todd with him being killed by Ledger's Joker in the climax)
 
I don't think this could happen. Nolan's Batman movies are 75% amazing but they're also very clearly written as standalone and wouldn't really make much sense in a universe where Aliens and woman made of clay are running around. There are no supernatural elements in Nolan's little comer of DC or really anything that suggest it's part of a larger universe.
 
Nolan-verse could conceivably worked as a starting point for a cinematic universe (even though Nolan has said that he only ever intended it to be a closed universe), but only if Dark Knight Rises was drastically altered leave room for Batman's return and if the 7 years of moping that Bruce Wayne did between TDK and TDKR was done away with to better accommodate a multi-hero timeline.

Green Lantern, while ostensibly a stand-alone movie, could have worked in a DC cinematic universe, but the fact that it was a critical and commercial disappointment weighed heavily against its incorporation. Maybe if a different actor other than the annoying Ryan Reynolds (Bradley Cooper was reportedly the second choice, and would have been perfect) had been selected for the lead.
 
For their cinematic universe? After the success of the Dark Knight and let's say Heath Ledger did not pass away and they decide (With some obvious revisions) to have the Green Lantern movie take part in the same world as the Dark Knight.
I don't think the Nolanverse would really mesh with stories about a space cop with a magic ring, a Greco-Roman half god warrior woman, an Arthurian underwater King with a magic trident, a guy who can run faster than the speed of light and can break the laws of physics at a whim or a super strong space god who's weak to little green rocks. Nolan was trying to make things down to earth. That's what I love about themarvel movies. They aren't afraid to embrace the silliness in comic books.
 
Batman's presence hurts both him and the other characters who would make up a D.C. Cinematic Universe. It hurts him because the presence of a character like Superman seems to make him redundant-which in turn can create a scenario he's either superfluous or more superhuman than Clark Kent. Either way-one of the characters suffer.

Even with Batman Begins-it's hard to unite Nolan's world-fantastic though it is-with a world that can include a character like Superman. So the idea of beginning the D.C. Universe with Nolan is problematic for that reason alone.

Huh. A Justice League without Batman could work--just look at Marvel. Before '07 nobody could give a crap about Ironman. X-Men, F4, and Spiderman were where it was at.

For a JL sans Batman you'd need to get Superman Returns to be really successful. Just have Nolan not want to associate Batman with Superman, and you'd maybe have a separate JL. Or, DC could always just reboot Batman after Nolan and stuff him in it.
 
The other problem even if they somehow start a unified universe from Batman Begins-is that Warner Brothers did not believe that a non-Batman related Superhero film would be successful-and therefore they weren't inclined to invest in such a film as a independent property.

Superman Returns-rightly or wrongly-was viewed as a disappointment. Green Lantern was an outright flop.

If you want D.C. to follow the Marvel model-which as I've said before all evidence suggests wouldn't be their inclination you need a non-Batman D.C. property to have a massively successful film sometime in the early/mid-2000's.

It'd have to be a success that was big enough that it could not be questioned and dismissed according to the rules of film industry accounting.

Otherwise-we're talking about something akin to Justice League Mortal being made rather than Marvel gradual approach.
 
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