According to Drew McWeeny at Hitfix, Warner Bros. has handed down an edict to the makers of DC Comic book films:
“No jokes.”
This has, of course, not been confirmed by anyone at Warner Bros. or DC, because that would be a silly thing to expect them to cop to.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that when a joke-riddled film like Guardians of the Galaxy — based on a comic book franchise that no one outside the comic book reading world has heard of — is sprinting its way to being the most successful movie of the year, Warner Bros. saying “…but we think superheroes are SERIOUS BUSINESS and don’t truck with that sort of Marvel tomfoolery” seems like lunacy.
McWeeny speculates if this mandate is true, then it’s in response to Green Lantern being “jokey” and not performing as well as could be expected from a superhero movie. (That’s my polite way of saying it fell flat on its green glowing ass.) It could possibly actually be that it flopped because no one but the fanboysiest of fanboys thinks Green Lantern is anything other than boring. (He’s boring, guys. Let it go. Ryan Reynolds couldn’t save him and we lost out on a Deadpool movie because of it, let’s just move on.)
No, wait, let’s not move on. Let’s look at the numbers of the DC Animated films, because it’s a pretty good barometer of what fans of all ages find interesting and will spend money on. Out of the twenty-one feature-length animated films that have been released so far, here are the top five, in terms of money: Superman: Doomsday, Superman / Batman: Public Enemies, Batman: Gotham Knight, Superman / Batman: Apocalypse, and Wonder Woman.
The two Green Lantern movies and the Justice League movies way underperformed those top five. The slap in the face is that after the Wonder Woman film was released, it was declared a failure and no other Wonder Woman or female-led films were produced. Clearly the general superhero movie-watching public care about the Amazon more than the dude who can make his fist into a bigger, greener fist, or am I just taking crazy pills? So maybe instead of making that film they should have made a freaking Wonder Woman movie already.
DC seems to be in this echo chamber where they just keep shouting stupid ideas at one another and the louder it gets the more they’re like “YES HIRE ZACK SNYDER AGAIN.” They’re honestly just bumming me out at this point. “No jokes” is right.
