Plague Carrier

Kris was sick last week, so didn’t make it in to get his comics. Saturday (after he was supposed to be better), I swung by his place and dropped off his stuff. I was there for all of five minutes, but by that night I was sick. I’m sure the Logical Thinkers in our readership will tell me there’s no way I could have caught something from him that quickly, but it’s the story I’m sticking with. Needless to say, I took proper precautions that it won’t happen again.

Last week I briefly mentioned the new Justice League movie and the post-Nolan era Batman reboot. We got a reader question about our thoughts and since I want to strongly encourage more reader feedback, instead of just replying to him (as I started to do), I figured I’d answer him here, thereby guilting encouraging others to send us feedback.

Anyway, the news reports for the Justice League movie said that it will be a stand alone movie and not connect to Nolan’s Batman franchise nor Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot. As such, we’d probably not see Christian Bale as Batman nor Henry Cavill as Superman in the JLA movie. Our inquisitive reader wanted to know what we thought about keeping the movies separate and whether we thought this was a good or a bad idea.

Clearly, DC and Warner Brothers is taking a different approach to the movies than Marvel. At some point either right before or right after Dark Knight came out, Nolan said point blank that in his Batman universe the only superhero is Batman. As such, there hasn’t been (nor will be) any mention of other heroes in Nolan’s movies. The Justice League announcement takes one director’s creative direction and cements it as the intentional direction of the DC movies. In contrast, Marvel has worked hard to intertwine its movies into one cohesive continuity. All of the most recent Marvel movies have cameos and scenes that connect the universe into one. After the Captain America and Thor movies come out, the stage will be set to bring each of the individual characters together as the Avengers to deal with some massive threat.

Keeping everything separate makes it easy to ignore stuff that sucks. Marvel’s multi-movie concept is a cool idea, but filled with risk. They did the first Hulk movie and it completely sucked. They then made a second movie with a new Bruce Banner, complete with a Tony Stark tie-in so it was cemented in this new shared universe. While that Hulk movie was better than the first, it still wasn’t that great. Not only that, Edward Norton was a huge pain for the studio to work with. Marvel has now dropped Norton and replaced him with Mark Ruffalo, but since the continuity has been tied together, now The Avengers has a “strike” against it because you have the previous Hulks dragging it down.

There are six movies that are essentially prequels to the Avengers movie: Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 1 & 2, Thor, and Captain America. Of those six movies, two sucked, two rocked, and two are unknowns as they haven’t come out yet. Based on trailers and other things we’ve heard, there’s a pretty good chance that Thor and Captain America are going to be good movies, but what if they’re not? What if the success of the Iron Man franchise had nothing to do with Marvel and everything to do with Robert Downey Jr. and John Favreau? If Cap and Thor suck, or even if just one sucks, you now have 50% or more of the prequel movies to The Avengers that were a disappointment. That is a rocky foundation for a blockbuster movie to be built upon. Regardless of how good The Avengers is as a stand alone movie, if the previous movies weren’t any good it will hamper enthusiasm for for the new movie.

On the contrary, if all of the movies are stand alone, like the DC movies, then who cares how bad the other movies were? If you didn’t like how Nolan portrayed Batman or how Snyder decides to portray Superman, the director of the Justice League movie might do something completely different, so you might as well give it a shot. If you enjoyed the previous movies, you’d still have an incentive to go and see the new movie because maybe the new portrayal of Batman/Superman will be heavily influenced by what came before. Regardless, if the movies are completely stand alone then the viewer (theoretically) has no preconceived notions of what he/she will see and the director has the creative freedom to do what they want.

I think the best example of the second approach (and why I think that approach will work for the better) is the Bond movies. At this point, there have been 24 James Bond movies: 22 of the “canon” EON productions movies and 2 others (the original Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again). If we ignore the non-canon films, there have been six different actors that have played James Bond. While the films from each “Bond era” are related, the over-arching eras are pretty much stand alone. Because you are seeing a Bond film, there are some common things you can expect: martinis, sexy women, cool gadgets, and nefarious villains, but since each Bond era is independent, you can enjoy it independently of the other eras even though they’re all Bond.

In the same way, there are now three eras of Batman: Burton, Schumacher and Nolan. Since they’re all Batman films, there are some common elements you can expect: drinks, sexy women, cool gadgets, and nefarious villains, but each era brings something different. Burton’s Batman is dark and perverse. Nolan’s Batman is dark and gritty. Schumacher’s Batman is campy and irreverent. The Justice League director will have his own Batman as will whoever takes over the series after Nolan finishes his trilogy. Just as each Bond is different but still Bond, each Batman will be different, but still Batman and that’s ok by me.

What are your thoughts, dear reader? Either contact us using Ret-Conned’s Contact-o-matic machine or write up your own blog post and send us a link.