The DCU Is In Bigger Trouble Than We Thought
A new report delivers a status update on DC’s small screen universe, and it’s looking bleak.
You know what they say about best-laid plans: they don’t always come to pass. It’s an inevitable fact of life — but when one is building a cinematic universe, that margin for error is expected to be a lot smaller. Marvel’s track record in that regard has been pretty strong. Of all the projects the superhero studio has announced, very few have been scrapped or abandoned. Of course, that doesn’t exactly account for the quality of those projects — and that’s largely why James Gunn and Peter Safran, the new stewards of the DC Universe, promised that nothing would get the green light unless its script and story were ironclad.
Sound strategy... if DC Studios wasn’t also just canceling anything that fails to meet their standards.
The new DCU began with a slate that was promising enough: Gunn and Safran gutted almost everything from the old guard, including the TV projects scattered across the multiverse. In their place came shows like Creature Commandos, a new season of Peacemaker, and plans for spinoffs (Waller, starring Viola Davis) and origin stories (the Wonder Woman prequel Paradise Lost, a grounded Green Lantern series, and a long-gestating Booster Gold project).
After three years, the Amanda Waller series is officially shelved.
It wasn’t what most expected from this first phase, but considering Gunn and Safran’s plans on the big screen — which included Superman and, eventually, Batman — focusing on random minor characters was easy to forgive. The DCU was still set on the path to deliver the thing everyone wanted: an expansive universe in which the Justice League takes center stage. Three years later, though, with half these projects still in limbo (or replaced outright by more random stories), this saga is in more trouble now than it was before.
A new report from The Ankler delivers a status update on DC’s small screen universe, and it’s a lot worse than anyone might have expected. Of the shows that DC Studios announced in its initial slate, only half have made it out of purgatory. Lanterns will be the latest to premiere on HBO, and though there are loose plans for a new season (as well as writers in place), sources tell The Ankler that it could just as easily feed into Man of Tomorrow, Gunn’s sequel to Superman. Meanwhile, both Waller and Paradise Lost have joined movies like The Authority and Swamp Thing on the cutting room floor. Booster Gold remains in development, but DC and HBO are searching for a new writer to helm it: its original writer, David Jenkins, has since moved on from the project.
The cracks were beginning to show for a lot of these projects when Gunn and Safran offered an update to The Hollywood Reporter last year. Safran called Waller “a bumpy road,” and also claimed that Booster Gold was waiting on its showrunner. “Maybe he fell out of love, maybe he got busy,” he said, “but we had to pivot.”
Catwoman almost got a spinoff like The Penguin, but DC turned down the pitch.
And pivot DC has, although not in a way that makes much sense. Gunn is enthusiastically building out a universe that’s focused almost entirely on Superman. After the success of the film, DC teased plans for a handful of spinoffs: one for Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and another following the goings-on at the Daily Planet, the newspaper that employs Superman’s mild-mannered alter ego. Only the latter has crystallized, with American Vandal creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda molding it into a two-hander between Superman’s Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and... Jimmy Tatro as Gorilla Grodd.
That’d all be fine if the DCU was expanding in other areas — or even working to introduce Batman and Wonder Woman, who form the other two points of DC’s Trinity alongside Superman. Gunn and Safran fast-tracked Clayface, a film focused on one of Batman’s oldest villains, last year, but it doesn’t seem interested in other members of Batman’s rogues’ gallery. Per The Ankler, DC turned down pitches for a Catwoman show (which likely would have focused on Zoë Kravitz’s version of the character, à la The Penguin) and a Poison Ivy story. The studio probably had its reasons for rejecting those ideas, but the plans it’s been making otherwise don’t bode well for the future of the franchise, either.
On the small screen, at least, the DCU feels more like alphabet soup than a concerted attempt to rebuild a cinematic universe. It’s getting harder to trust the process as time goes on — and the “process” in question takes a backseat to Gunn and Safran’s random whims.
