https://io9.gizmodo.com/dcs-new-gods-movie-has-rumors-swirling-about-its-main-c-1831717573
A Mister Miracle Heist Movie set on Apokolips or New Genesis would be bananaballs awesome.
Edited by Larkmarn on Jan 16th 2019 at 1:17:04 PM
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(New) God, I would love that.
Taking it "one movie at a time" pretty much is the Marvel playbook.
The "auteur" approach would have been much more striking in comparison to the MCU a few years back, c. phase 1 and mid phase 2. By now (phase 3), Marvel has moved on to a more "auteur" based model, what with Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy (1 and 2) and Thor Ragnarok so I can't really say "auteur-based" is actually anything revolutionary now.
The idea of doing more standalone and unconnected movies is more aside from MCU, but it seems a little counter-productive to have a shared universe consisting of unconnected movies.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
I have a deja vu...wasn't the "we take a more director driven approach" the line they used to sell the DCEU, too?
That was before Suicide Squad and Justice League, where studio involvement is largely to blame for how they were received. BVS too, to a lesser extent, as it was probably seen as a Necessary Evil in order to establish the Shared Universe over just telling their own story. Seeing that Wonder Woman and Aquaman did well and the common thread is "let the directors make it" and that was their stated goal early on, it takes some time to get rid of bad habits.
The MCU is also far from auteur driven. Some more than others, but GOTG is the only franchise where it seems like the movie wouldn't have been made if not for the director. They may be able to give some broader input and may even enjoy the experience but they are all heavily made by committee, from script to editing to production design. No director with their baby would be okay with putting in ads for someone else's movie. That is the biggest common thread with WW and Aquaman, how they don't spend much time, if at all, acknowledging the rest of the DCEU.
It's veritably impossible for a big studio shared universe franchise of dozens of directors to be "truly" auteur driven, but it's ridiculous to claim Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther don't have the undeniable auteur vision of their directors behind them, or the Russo Brothers productions for that matter.
The days where the MCU struggled to balance "auteur vision" and "big studio shared universe" where circa Phase 1 to mid-2, with the falling out with Ant-Man's original director Edgar Wright being the most public and memorable example. By now, it seems like they worked out how to balance the two aspects. In Phase 3, the only movie that felt somewhat "studio safe" and less "creator driven" was Doctor Strange. Every other one safely and clearly incorporated the director's "auteur vision" behind them.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
The Head of the Hydra
And you have people who say the MCU movies are all the same or follow the same beats.
Sure there's common elements but they all have their own style.
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
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You are actually wrong about Got G. The project was born out of the Marvel's writers room. You can thank Nicole Perlman for that, who fished the Got G out of the various comic books she was given and then wrote a first draft. THAN Disney looked for the right director and settled on James Gunn. So, Got G would have happened, one way or another. It would have looked different in the hands of another director, though.
The notion of auteur driven movies is BS anyway. Movies are ALWAYS group projects.
Edited by Swanpride on Jan 19th 2019 at 5:21:11 AM
If you ask me, the DCEU should differentiate itself by doing what Fox was starting to do before Marvel bought them out: go wild with bizarre, R-rated superhero films like Logan and Deadpool (John Constantine is just waitin' around the corner), because this notion of "auteur-driven projects" (even setting aside how questionable auteur theory is) is still playing catch-up with the MCU.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
They can have their cake and eat it too...if they put the work into it. Theoretically they could start from scratch, built a proper universe this time around and also do "elsewhere" movies.
But after the success of Aquaman and Wonder Woman, they won't do it.
The Auteur Theory is the basic premise that everything we see in a film is filtered through the director and that is why they should be viewed as the "author" of the film. This is mostly true, at least in theory, and useful in addressing the recurring elements of the film and especially when comparing different movies by the same director (every Hitchcock movie has a certain Hitchcockian quality to it). Every film is going to be influenced by the director in some fashion, but depending on how tight the studio control is that influence is going to be reduced. The problem is that people started to credit the director in Director Driven films as being the sole creative talent, which diminishes the contributions of near everyone except the actors.
With the MCU movies these recurring elements are significantly reduced compared to when the director has stronger creative control. This includes Black Panther and Thor Ragnarok. I remember thinking while watching Ragnarok that it had some bland camera work and generic staging, then would hit you with something like Valkyrie's flashback. With Black Panther, while the directors history with Oakland is on full display there are several times I found myself asking for something other than a medium shot of the actors talking.
In contrast, both Wonder Woman and Aquaman have much stronger director touches throughout the film. The progressive way Diana grows into her powers is not something easily done by committee, and James Wan's horror background and camera work is on display in every scene.
The "mostly" is where the squabble comes from. A lot of schools of thought regarding cinema have decided that filmmaking is a art form that is inherently collective, and the basic principle of "auteur theory" itself is inherently harmful and diminishes the "non-auteurs" involved in projects. While I obviously agree that directors have a lot of input in the film's direction, I think auteur theory has done far more harm to film and film studies than it has done good. Among many other problems (diminishing other aspects of filmmaking, leading to directorial abuses of power), there's this sort of argument you're putting forth, where you've thrown wild speculation into the air by arbitrarily suggesting flat medium shots are studio-mandated, ignoring the fact Ryan Coogler uses flat medium shots fairly regularly in most of his work. Matter of fact, the cinematographer of Black Panther is the same from Fruitvale Station (Academy Award nominated Rachel Morrison), brought specifically by Ryan Coogler because he liked working with her in Fruitvale Station. There's times great directors/cinematographers just go with choices you disagree with, and that's a fact of life that you can't just always duck with wild speculation about the studio mandating a shot for some nebulous reason.
When Aquaman hit me with the pretty badly shot and even worse edited sequence in the submarine, my immediate assumption wasn't that Warner Bros demanded James Wan throw his sequence through a blender, but simply that Wan tried something that didn't work for me, even because I've watched most of Wan's work and always found him a mediocre director, so I was expecting Wan to have some schizophrenic choices.
The bits where I actually see studio influence showing more is in the action scenes, partly because "get more action scenes in there" tends to be one of the most reocurring bits of studio mandates we actually hear about. Neither Coogler nor Jenkins managed to really jive with the action scenes, partly due inexperience on their part, and it tells because the action scenes of Wonder Woman and Black Panther both suffer from being a tad generic (with exceptions like bits of the No Man's Land Sequence and T'challa's fight with M'baku). Wan managed decently but still ended up with many choppily-edited and Snyder-esque sequences that didn't quite work for me. Waititi is the one who acquainted himself best with the action scenes, out of all four directors we're talking about.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
You're right in that the WB let their director's have a bit more room to play around with the films, but I think those films were also constrained by the studio. Especially because you forgot the DCEU film that was impacted the most by it's director: Batman v Superman. That movie was filled with things that could only be described as "Snyder-esque." But unlike Wonder Woman and Aquaman, those touches didn't add to the film in any meaningful way, but rather turned the film into kind of a Brechtian nightmare. When BVS got its critical backlash (way more than, I think, the WB was expecting), I believe the studio decided to keep a tighter hold on the films.
Suicide Squad and Justice League were going to be messes even prior to studio interference — the first due to lack of time for writing the script/pre-production and the second because Snyder left the film unfinished and it was clear the studio didn't want to go with what he had already filmed.
Wonder Woman and Aquaman both worked because they had directors who had a clear vision, plenty of time for the writers to work on the script and for preproduction, and were able to work within the confines of the studio system.
The Auteur theory is probably the reason film analysis started to give credit to a movie beyond the actors in the movie. It was a catchy theory, much like MacGuffin, in how casual film goers could latch on to an idea, and why Hitchcock was one of the first real celebrity directors.
An underlying issue is that action scenes are among the easiest things to develop by committee. You throw enough money at a movie and the Money-Making Shot(s) will at least be somewhat more interesting and engaging. The flat and static shots are rather popular for these studio films precisely because they are easy to edit together and look good in the dailies. But it is that contrast between the pretty and engaging shots with flat and static shots that makes it obvious that it doesn't have a continuous vision. Imagine if Birdman decided on a bunch of quick cuts in one scene for no reason. In fact, there was a recent interview with an indie filmmaker who said she was approached by Marvel for Black Widow and when she expressed excitement over crafting the action scenes was told they would handle all of that.
See, I think studios are often portrayed wrongly. That's because we tend to notice it when a studio made a wrong decision or when we assume that a decision was the fault of the studio, but we don't tend to notice when a studio actually does good work. There have been directors which have gotten totally off the rails the moment the studio didn't look too closely anymore.
Hell, lectors exist for a reason. Not just to correct spelling mistake, above all they are giving writers feedback, helping them to shape a narrative in the right direction. It is the same with studios. Partly they keep track of the money, but they also have an interest to keep the director focussed.
Birdman would have been a better movie if someone had told the directors to keep the "one cut" BS to the scenes when the play is actually on, to translate the feeling of being behind the stage with everything which is going on to film. By doing it the whole time, they cheapened it to a cheap gimmick. And yes, I know it is kind of arrogant to say something like this about an academy award winning feature.
Edited by Swanpride on Jan 19th 2019 at 9:30:12 AM
Marvel lucked out with getting the Russo Brothers, because they have a history of doing dynamic action scenes in comedies and there are also two of them, but if you want to see how bad it can get when you hire an indie filmmaker for a big budget film, just look at Fan4stic. Very little action at all and what little action scenes there are were probably put in via reshoots. The entire film is dark, muddied, and hard to watch, something that wouldn't be out of place in a horror film.
Marvel has an action department which always handles stuff like this. That is part of the reason why they usually deliver quality.
I wouldn't go as far as saying the auteur theory rescued cinema from being nothing but mindless entertainment. The auteur theory naturally had its contributions in its heyday, but on the whole, I'd pretty surely say it has done more harm than good. Auteur theory is a sizeable chunk of the reason "auteurs" like Polanski and Allen have been able to get away with heinous crimes and the reason Kubrick and the aforementioned Hitchcock were able to get away with what's effectively psychological and mental torture/harassment of their actors under the vague excuse of being a "auteur" but we're getting side-tracked here so I'll let that argument be.
Ultimately, speculating about things like whether Coogler's use of static shots (also previously seen in most of his independent work) is kind of a fool's errand because it's a discussion seeped in wild speculation.
The fact action scenes stay consistently generic throughout so many directors is more interesting though. There are exceptions to the rule, like the Russo Brothers managing some pretty uniquely-shot fight scenes in Winter Soldier and Infinity War., but overall it's a dire situation. Even David Leitch, renowned for his work in John Wick and Atomic Blonde didn't manage to bring that same type of slick action to Deadpool2.
Maybe DC should hire Chad Stahelski (the other half of the John Wick duo) to do something action-focused and we might see this "bold auteur vision" for the DCEU at work. Maybe Deadshot if you want to salvage something from Suicide Squad or Deathstroke if you wanna be funny about it (given Leitch directed Deadpool).
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
Takat Empress
Gonna be weird to see WW and Aquaman never meet up again.
Mileena Madness
They're going to make another Justice League movie, if only because they'll see how much Avengers: Endgame will make and they'll want to try again. Hopefully, with a single director and a singular vision this time, but I don't believe for a second that they are abandoning the JL movies.
They might try, but they have to EARN a moment like this. And that means that they need a coherent universe first. and that means that they have start again.
If they ever try, I would suggest to start with the worldbuilding. No origin movies (other than perhaps for Green Arrow, since only a fraction of the general audience watched Arrow), but movies which focus on introducing the cities in the DC universe.
This might sound crazy...but I would start with a Robin movie. Not a Batman and Robin movie, a Robin movie. Imagine this: Tell the story how Robin and his family comes with the circus to Gotham city, how his parents die and he is taken in by billionaire Bruce Wayne.
This way you can explore both Gotham and Bruce Wayne/Batman from an outsider perspective. And you can tell the story from Dick's perspective. I mean...how would you feel if you are suddenly adopted by a reclusive billionaire? Would you trust this guy? Especially if you are a "circus brat" so to speak? There is a lot of character exploration in this set up which is way more interesting than the usual "Batman fights against crazy villain" story.
" indicating that it was the name that caught his attention rather than the fact that the man he is about to kill is begging him to save someone. "
The name caught is atention because he dosent know why he said it, he thinks is just a last atempt to avoid killing him.
"He doesn't look like the hero, he looks like the hero but young at a time when Dented Iron is the thing hurting the hero."
You miss the point, sure X-24 match the theme and all that but in the end is just wolering but as brute, it work as bigger picture but he is just boring because of it, Doomsday kinda run on the same issue.
"I think they're painting him as anti-Batman?" Lex is anti batman in some aways, in a comic when gothan is insolated for a earthquake we see the rivarly between the two, is when lex focus in the tech thing that is more apropiate match to superman.
"hy not make it all about the destruction of metropolis? " Because metropolis is a clear alien invasion, it would be like people being piss at thor for stoping the chitauri, africa is a moment when Superman clearly intervine in a human conflict with all the issue that it entail.
"But I wouldn't have changed how it went down because it was thematically necessary"
I would have change it, the fight is boring and samey it, in fact seen but fighting without suit was more satifying, also erick and tchalla are oposite, not equals.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"