The rivalry between two giant superhero brands Marvel Studios and DC Studios has always been on the deck. Over decades, the two rival brands have been in serious competition to rise over one another. Henry Cavill joined DC Studios to play Superman, but he couldn’t rescue the brand.
The Warner Brothers-owned superhero brand DC Studios had some hard luck in their attempt to assert dominance over the genre. Meanwhile, Marvel Studios’ establishment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe proved to be the ace in the right whole.
Warner Brothers Wanted Their Version of MCU
The rapid rise of the MCU was dominating the superhero genre with the release of Iron Man in 2008 and later a stream of standalone movies introducing the superheroes while making room for their sequels. Eventually, the franchises made today’s giant superhero brand, MCU. A similar tactic was in the development that came straight from WB. Speaking with Josh Horowitz in his Happy Sad Confused podcast, the writer of Man of Steel, David S. Goyer revealed that WB was desperate to catch up the pace of MCU.
“I know the pressure we were getting from Warner Bros., which was, ‘We need our MCU! We need our MCU!’ And I was like let’s not run before we walk. The other thing that was difficult at the time was there was this revolving door of executives at Warner Bros. and DC,” Goyer said.
Many argue the fact that the executive decision is somewhat responsible for the fall of DC projects as they had to crawl to get to decent box office numbers.
Warner Brothers Had A Solid Plan to Destroy MCU Until They Didn’t
DC Studios lacks, as experts argue, the right plan to execute their projects to be box-office friendly. But it would be wrong to say that they never had any plans, to begin with. As Goyer revealed, one executive proposed a 10-year plan with 20 films including a sequel for Man of Steel starring Henry Cavill.
“Every 18 months someone new would come in. We were just getting whiplash. Every new person was like, ‘We’re going to go bigger!’ I remember at one point the person running Warner Bros. at the time had this release that pitched the next 20 movies over the next 10 years. But none of them had been written yet!’ It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air… This is not how you build a house,” Goyer told Horowitz.
The plan was, however, inherently flawed as they never had a single script for any of these planned movies. Perhaps, similar to the MCU, the WB executives wanted to make standalone superhero movies to revamp their brand but it never happened, even Cavill never got to fly solo in DC again.
