We Are Never Going to Get a Justice League Movie

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We just aren’t. It’s never going to happen, deal with it. Warner Brothers certainly seems to disagree: the opening weekend success of Man of Steel has them absolutely bullish on a Justice League movie and supposedly David Goyer has been given the go ahead to start working on the script. To them, the new Superman movie can serve as the first step down the path to making DC’s equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

This optimism is expected from a business perspective, but creatively it makes me wonder if they actually bother to watch the movie they just put out. Because to me, Man of Steel not only won’t be able to feed into a Justice League film, it likely killed off the possibility of that project ever happening.

Look, Justice League was always going to be a bit harder of a sell than The Avengers. For all their superpowers, Marvel’s heroes are for the most part relatively mortal (give or take an invincible rage monster or two) and were designed with interaction in mind. DC’s heavy hitters are…not. Of the seven characters most likely to fill out the JL roster1, only three of them are human. Discounting the guy with alien-granted ‘do anything’ jewelry and the one who can outrun death and we’re left with only Batman as the only typical ‘grounded’ hero, for definitions of grounded that include “owns dozens of tanks, stealth jets, and a monitoring system that would make PRISM wet its pants.” Relatability, then, becomes the watchword, and while blending these characters into an engrossing story isn’t impossible, it’s still a task with a built-in handicap.

Of course even apart from the script, every superhero blockbuster must inevitably erupt into action sequences, and it’s here that Man of Steel should be the final nail in Justice League’s coffin. Ensemble action movies need to allow every member of the team get something unique to do in a fight. This is vital: it lets each character show the audience what makes them special enough to be worth caring about. Obviously some characters can be more effective than others when push comes to shove; in The Avengers, Hawkeye and Black Widow took down a couple dozen aliens combined while Thor and Hulk were blasting entire leviathans and Iron Man nuked a full armada. But even there, the two unpowered Avengers each fulfilled a specific tactical role and contributed to what was very much a team victory.

In contrast, we’re one movie into what Warner Bros hopes will become it’s “DCCU”2 and I’m already seeing some disparities in strength and scale of DC’s heroes that make Hawkeye v. Hulk look like a fair fight. Take Batman. In the comics Bruce Wayne can be shown outthinking and outmaneuvering villains with enough skill to put him on an even playing field with Kryptonians and metahumans. In a Man of Steel world however? Batman would be flattened and killed before he could even draw a batarang. MoS’s fight scenes are astonishing, the purest depiction of superhumans just letting loose on each other we’ve yet seen. But in upping the bar for superpowered throwdowns to a point where brawls inflict $700 billion dollars of damage in minutes, Warner Bros has created a world that is incapable of supporting characters like Batman, no matter how many Wayne Industries satellites they want to toss into their scripts. The way they’ve translated Superman’s abilities onto the big screen puts him so far out of Batman’s league that the Dark Knight’s presence alongside him would shatter all suspensions of disbelief.3

Just for the sake of argument however, let’s say the Batman Problem is solved. Maybe DC gives him a crazy battlesuit, or even cuts him out entirely4. Then we’re left with a team of Superman-level heroes, which has its own problem. Namely, you have a whole team of characters as powerful as Superman. As well-done as Man of Steel’s action was, the fights were so grand in scope and lasted so long that after a while a sense of ‘action fatigue’ set in.  And that was what happened when one god-like entity throws down. Multiply that by seven and the result would be an overload of spectacle. There’s a limit to how much audiences can process at once and if MoS is the baseline then unleashing the full Justice League would result in action that is either incomprehensibly busy or exhausting to watch. When everything is epic and over-sized, nothing is actually special.

So DC and Warner Brothers are left deciding between having the most lopsided roster since Angel Summoner & BMX Bandit or an overwhelming – and by extension, bland – group of gods. They can’t scale down Superman after Man of Steel without appearing to be moving backwards. They don’t even have an obvious option for a villain for their heroes to be fighting against.5 And so I’m calling it: bye bye Justice League. The idea of you had a good run, but it’s time to throw in the towel.

Oh well, there’s always the cartoon…

1: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern (hopefully anyone but Hal Jordan), Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman. The first five would pretty much be locks, substitute Hawkman/woman, Cyborg, or Plastic as needed. Or Vibe if they’re f*cking with us.

2: Working title

3: This would only be made more obvious when Batman is inevitably one of the two main characters. People can still argue Hawkeye’s general usefulness but he also received the least screentime of his team.

4: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

5: They had Darkseid, but Marvel preemptive introduction of Thanos into the MCU is an ingenous way to ensure DC’s best option would be constantly compared against his own knockoff.