Man of Steel, Batman V Superman, and now Suicide Squad. Personal opinions aside, you cannot deny that with the amount of diversity between fans among these films, things could be going exceptionally better.
The problems with these films have been pointed out by fans so much to the point of annoyance.
Personally, I wasn’t worried about the future of DC’s films until Suicide Squad made its debut earlier this month. I thought Man of Steel was solid. Not great but I was thoroughly entertained throughout. Now granted, I haven’t seen that film in easily close to two years, but when I think back to it, I don’t remember being disappointed like I was when I saw Batman V Superman
Batman V Superman had a lot of hype, potential, and pressure to live up to. A film that had a 250 Million dollar budget and two of arguably the most popular characters ever obviously would. So when I saw it, I was easily let down by the amount of shoehorned cameos and ridiculous plotlines that never blew me away. The short version is, it was just a huge mess.
But you’ve heard all of that before. It’s like beating a dead horse at this point. The main reason I wasn’t worried at that point was because of Suicide Squad. The first trailer looked promising. If you remember, those trailers gave you a different feeling of the tone of the movie then what it actually turned out to be. Instead of a darker, grittier, and more centered film, we got another crowded, choppy, and over the top film that didn’t even come close to satisfying me and most viewers.
The original logo of Suicide Squad was a dark metallic font that set the tone for the film. (See below)
It aligned pretty well with the first trailer. Our first look at Suicide Squad was a realistic, chilling, and pretty somber tone. Personally, it sounded amazing to me. Not to mention that joker appearance at the end was very educing.
But somehow, because of the result of Batman V Superman’s critical response of the film “Not being fun enough,” they decided to rehash the ENTIRE film to appeal to that ONE complaint and our first glimpse of that reaction coming into play was the logo change.
To me, that’s the reason this movie failed critically. The box office numbers obviously hold up pretty well and anybody reading this article has probably seen all DC films and you will most likely see the majority of future ones.
The overall problem here is that it seems DC can’t figure out what kind of world they want to build here. They went dark and gritty with BvS but people complained it’s not as fun as marvel, so they take their next film, which happened to be suicide squad and in the MIDDLE OF PRODUCTION, and did a complete over hall on the film to appeal to that one complaint and in the process of doing that, made a choppy, inconsistent, and overall disappointing movie. I mean seriously, within that first trailer did it really look like Bohemian Rhapsody would fit well as a song in that film? Absolutely not. Most Marvel films have that same tonal feel. It can be dark and serious when it needs to be, but there are always good moments of humor thrown within them. Sometimes it works better then others but with all the flashy colors and neon logos suicide squad brought, I don’t remember hearing many laughs within the theatre. The reason for that is because this movie was originally not intended to have big amounts of humor and be a “fun” movie. Obviously your suppose to have fun while you see it, but not in a Guardians of the Galaxy kind of fun. More like a Christopher Nolan Dark Knight kind of fun.
I truly believe there was a good movie within the footage they shot. I feel let down with the amount of Joker clips cut out, the tonal shift, and amount of re-shoots that were obviously used to lighten up the film so this could be DC’s version of Guardians of the Galaxy.
Call me gullible but I actually see huge potential for Ben Affleck’s solo Batman film. I’ve always enjoyed his directing work but besides that, I’m not stoked for Wonder woman, The Flash, or Aquamans future films and it simply comes down to the fact that at this point, I don’t trust DC to make a film they are 100% committed too. Of course I will see them, but given DC’s recent history, I will be skeptically optimistic…