Justice League

That idea could kind of work if Mxyzptlk was played like a Q. Trickster, unsure where he stands, but is ultimately not a villain.

I was never opposed to the idea. I would actually adore a movie that committed to that type of premise. But that is the key, commitment. Don't fall back and put an "end of the world" story in the third act. The reason is that most superhero films have elements of Slice of Life in them already. The first half of Superman III was Clark going to the Smallville High class reunion and Superman dealing with disasters he didn't know were connected. Even BVS was rather Slice of Life from right after the Africa Incident to right before the Senate Bombing, from Bruce tracking down Anatoli to Clark investigating The Batman and especially the "Gods Among Us" sequence. The STAS episode "Mxyzpixilated" was so much fun because the entire format was atypical and Superman treated it as a regular nuisance he has to deal with.

Honestly, this goes down a different path that I think shared universes need to explore more, and that is having short films with the actors playing their characters so that you can explore that type of stuff. The MCU has done that a little, but imagine a 15 minute short film with Cavill as Superman dealing with a minor enemy like Toyman. If done right, it could also be a great trailer for the next film. In practice it's really no different than the Deadpool 2 teaser.

So, basically, a Marvel One-Shot, but with Superman, right? That could definitely work.

Honestly, if they did an entire movie of various vignettes of different superheroes, that would be great, too. One of the reasons why Justice League Unlimited is so well remembered is that it was able to do short adventures with more obscure or minor characters really well (like Booster Gold in "The Greatest Story Never Told").

edited 2nd Apr '17 10:54:41 PM by alliterator

Again, though, that's what television is for.

Slice of Life movies generally only work if they're comedies, where as long as it's funny, it doesn't really matter if the plot doesn't go much of anywhere.

edited 3rd Apr '17 12:51:27 AM by RavenWilder

Again, no it's not. There's nothing about this story that inherently requires it to be long-form. That's what time skips are for. Superman For All Seasons was four issues long, same as The Dark Knight Returns.

Expand your mind, dude. It's entirely arbitrary to say that film is somehow a less flexible medium than TV or comics. Time is a limiting factor, sure, and there are some stories that are worth decompressing. Just not every story. There's nothing inherently unfilmable about superhero conflicts on a smaller scale, so really the only barrier is the untested assumption that 'it won't work'.

And to say that the plot goes nowhere is missing the point. The characters in a slice-of-life story drive the plot. They create it through their actions. Just because the conflicts are mostly internal doesn't mean they aren't there.

Not that the conflict in a day in Superman's life would be exclusively internal, mind you. This is still a guy in a cape going around beating up costumed villains, giant-sized toys, whatever it is Mr Mxyztplk throws his way. Even if there isn't one single plot, the episodic plots come together to form a whole, tied together by some thematic or emotional throughline. Think Gulliver's Travels, or for that matter The Lord of the Rings. Just because it's not a physical journey doesn't mean you can't find that sense of forward momentum.

Ten years ago, nobody thought the MCU would work. They thought that trying to bring TV and comic-like interconnectedness to theatres was, if not impossible, then at the very least unprofitable. It just takes the right team behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera.

edited 3rd Apr '17 1:24:57 AM by Unsung

Who said anything about long form? Television can be long form, telling a single story across dozens or hundreds of episodes. But it can also be incredibly short form, telling stories that begin and end within a single episode.

The question isn't the length of the story, but rather the delivery mechanism. As I mentioned before, going to a movie theater is a much bigger commitment from viewers than simply turning on a TV set or signing in to a streaming service, so the movie needs to promise them something worth that extra effort. If people leave a movie with the sense that it was enjoyable, but nothing of any significance happened in it, they're far less likely to recommend that other people see it, at least not while it's still in theaters.

Plenty could happen— lives saved, villains thwarted, disasters averted. It's just not the end of the world.

And, as I said earlier, you don't need world-in-peril stakes, but you do need something very important to the characters to occur.

Take for instance the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. While not a superhero movie per se, it is a fantasy/action story where the heroes and villains have superhuman fighting abilities. And it has an episodic plot: the lead character starts dating a woman whose jealous exes decide to challenge him to fights, one-by-one. And, despite all the violence being dished out, the stakes never rise higher than whether the Love Triangle will work out and whether the supporting characters will ever make something of their band. However, while objectively small scale, those romantic and career problems are deeply important to our main characters, and by the end of the movie those characters and their conflicts have all gone through major changes: they end the movie in a very different place (emotionally speaking) from where they started.

That is very different from being Slice of Life. One of the key hallmarks of the Slice of Life genre is that the characters and their situation don't change much, if at all, over the course of the story, since it's just depicting a random stretch of time in the characters' lives where nothing terribly important happens.

Some people have called Dredd a Slice of Life action movie, but I don't think that's accurate. For Dredd himself, yeah, the movie's events are just another day on the job, but Dredd isn't the audience identification figure. He's a literally faceless, almost emotionless professional who we learn nothing about other than his abilities on the job. He's there to do badass stuff and drive the plot forward, but it's all the other characters in the film that the audience has to turn to for an emotional connection, and for them the movie's plot is very much a major, life-and-death affair. It's Slice of Life in the same way that the Friday the 13th movies are Slice of Life if you take the perspective of Jason Voorhees.

I suppose you could do a superhero movie where the superhero is a more emotionally remote figure and it's all the people they interact with who form the emotional core of the story, but that doesn't seem to be what people have been talking about.

I'd say a formula with all the conveniences of a Slice of Life show, yet still presenting the action and stakes expected of superhero stories, is the mystery procedural. Much like in Dredd, the main character of a mystery is often little more than a cipher, a viewpoint from which the mystery is revealed. At best, there's the buddy cop routine, where the main characters reflect on the plot, but don't actually drive it. And rather than a whodunit, the basis of the story would be the particulars of the villain's plan, likely including the next target that the heroes scramble to defend.

If anything, the main difference I find between superheroes and other high-risk professionals like cops and spies is that the latter are indeed professionals - they don't take every single mission personally. Meanwhile, there's nothing superheroes like more than playing the messiah trying to prevent the apocalypse; thing is, there's only so long that this can be milked. I've seen Doctor Strange described as the first generic superhero movie, meaning that global stakes and heroic character development are already taken as a boring formula by themselves. It's only fitting that something as formulaic as the mystery procedural might be considered refreshing in turn.

Now I want Clark and Bruce to solve a mystery.

That's a common feature in crossovers, actually - a challenge too big for the low-key detective types, and too complex for the bruisers. Even The Avengers worked like that - the central problem was figuring out Loki's plan; from then on, stopping it was merely the cherry on top, so it didn't feel anti-climactic.

I'd say the real issue is that modern superhero filmmakers don't come from the usual action movie stables. Michael Bay may be a mindless pyromaniac, but he's got the pedigree where it counts, so he knows that in an action film, the real star is the villain or, in stories without one, the big issue that's grander than anything else. To contrast, superhero films get too personal too fast, as if global problems exist only to promote the hero's character development. The notion that there are issues more important (gasp!) and more interesting (shudder!) than the heroes' petty personal problems, is all but verboten.

What I liked about BVS was that Superman's presence as an alien behemoth remained the fulcrum of the story - unlike the typical internal team squabbles, that was still an issue you won't see in a prime crime drama or a family soap. So when Justice League comes along, I expect it to remain just as focused on the grand threat befalling mankind, rather than the snarky setbacks during the titular team's recruitment.

edited 3rd Apr '17 4:49:03 AM by indiana404

Does Clark even realize how threatening he can appear? And does Clark always grab the Idiot Ball whenever Batman is around or does Batman have some unknown ability to make everyone around him suddenly lose the capacity to strategize? Would it have been funny if instead of trying to threaten Batman into retiring, Clark just pick Batman up and take him to Smallville so his mom can give Bruce a talking too?

My ideal Superman for All Seasons movie would have Superman kind of barely show up — in a runtime of two hours, he would have, at best, twenty to thirty minutes of screentime. And most of that he would share with the actual viewpoint character: Maggie Sawyer.

So yeah, that's my idea: the movie begins in the winter, where Superman shows up at the Metropolis Police Department and tells Captain Sawyer that a friend of his works with his PD, so he felt that he ought to do the same and gives her a signal watch in case there is any emergency that requires Superman on the scene.

Then we get four action vignettes — spring, summer, autumn, and winter again — as we see Captain Sawyer call for Superman four times and we see their evolving relationship, as well as the evolving relationship between various secondary characters, like Toby Raines and Dan Turpin and Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and so on. Superman himself is the cipher (the Dredd), while Sawyer would be the audience surrogate, at first considering Superman dangerous and not wanting to call him in even when facing down a giant mecha (yes, this would be Toyman), but then slowly softening towards him as she sees him vulnerable during his battle with Parasite (I figure she saves the day in this instance by shooting Parasite with a kryptonite bullet Superman gave her "just in case").

So yeah. I would love a movie like that.

Batman's stupidity-inducing field is a well-established phenomenon, typically under writers who insist on making him a frontline fighter alongside the nigh-demigods of the League. I'd much rather see him act more subversively. In fact, I hope the upcoming film will bring back the Star Wars classic of a multi-layer battle, with Wonder Woman and Aquaman leading their respective armies, Batman and maybe Cyborg getting down and dirty on the lower decks, and the Flash and eventually Superman taking on the big hitters. In general, given their usual variety, few superhero teams are actually suited for the splash-style melees where everyone does pretty much the same thing, never mind how both metallic mook armies and downtown showdowns have become quite overdone by now.

edited 3rd Apr '17 7:31:56 AM by indiana404

Batman should be using stealth to thwart the Bg Bad's plan, not fighting on the front lines! A thrown batarang doesn't really look as impressive next to heat vison beams, a green lantern beam, the lasso of truth, and what ever other distance attacks the rest of the Justice League are using. At least the "stupidity inducing field" also works on the bad guys. As a general rule, if you underestimate Batman you lose. If you don't underestimate Batman, he escapes(because he's Batman!) or he gets rescued, because Plot Armor. I'm pretty certain that Bruce's Plot Armor is more invincible than Clark's Nigh-Invulnerability!

is what I call the "batman syndrome" where batman does the exact same thing other hero do but is prise because he is the badass normal, even when in situation were the "normal" is lacking.

@Raven Wilder- Moving the goalposts. I wasn't the one who used the term Slice of Life to begin with, but whatever you want to call it, I was just saying that I'd like to see a Superman movie with an episodic plot where the world isn't in imminent peril, and that there's no reason it can't work. So I think we're good.

@alliterator- As long as we get some interplay between Superman and the villains in question, we're good. The thing about making Superman more of a cipher is that it works based on what the audience already knows about the character, playing on those expectations. Dredd being a stone-cold badass is something the audience can infer right away, but we haven't really seen his cheesier Big Blue Boy Scout persona on the big screen recently.

I also kind of liked how each issue of SFAS gave the viewpoint to a different character. Not sure about sticking with Maggie Sawyer for that the whole time.

Ahh, but whose Plot Armour is stronger, Batman or Superman's? Who's actually come back from the dead more times, if you count up all their Silver Age hijinks?

edited 3rd Apr '17 8:50:19 AM by Unsung

I'd say Batman's. While Superman doesn't usually die as a result of it, he does have to deal with getting Worfed all the time, while Batman's the opposite.

edited 3rd Apr '17 8:47:20 AM by KnownUnknown

I don't know about the Silver Age, but in the Modern Age, Superman just came back from the dead, while Batman was thrust through time and had to survive living in different time periods and figure out how to come back to the present without destroying the entire world in the process.

...so yeah.

edited 3rd Apr '17 8:55:26 AM by alliterator

Actually, Superman's done that, too. I refer you to the 90's story arc "Time and Time Again."

Ciaran Hinds confirms he is playing Steppenwolf and offers some new plot details.

He provided motion capture work for Steppenwolf and would be all CG except for his mouth and eyes.

He also mention that Zack Snyder and the rest of the crew are fans of Excalibur from 1981 which Ciaran Hinds was in as King Lot.

Here are some similarities and shout outs to Excalibur in Batman v Superman◊

edited 5th Apr '17 10:59:59 AM by Halberdier17

Interesting, sounds like Darkseid is prominently a part of the story through Steppenwolf and won't just be revealed at the end. It makes sense, the Thanos reveal in Avengers was a surprise because it could have been almost anyone, whereas you have Steppenwolf and parademons anyone familiar with DC knows who's behind it.

Joe Manganiello was really close to playing Superman in Man of Steel.

Don't really know the actor, but that stinks. But hey, if he's still gunning for a big superhero​ role, this is still a great market for it.