It’s no secret that every studio with an in-house batch of caped crusaders is looking to the miracle Disney and Marvel Studios performed with Marvel Phase 1 and Joss Whedon’s Avengers Assemble.
But while 20th Century Fox and their superhero creative consultant Mark Millar have a fairly easy job catching up – all the X-Men and Wolverine movies are part of the same world anyway, while Deadpool and Fantastic Four are being rebooted – for DC the job is much, much harder.
“I actually think the big problem for them is the characters are just too out of date,” said Millar, talking exclusively to SciFiNow. “The characters were created 75 years ago, even the newest major character was created 68 years ago, so they’re in a really weird time.”
Warner Bros and DC plan to follow up Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot, Man Of Steel, with a Justice League movie – their direct answer to Avengers Assemble – that will unite all the big name characters in the line. Due for release in 2015, directly opposite the Avengers sequel, Millar reckons that it can’t be done and it’s the iconic nature of their biggest name characters that’s the real problem.
“Now the stuff I grew up with… I adored the DC stuff growing up but really, how do you do a movie about Green Lantern,” asks Millar, “his power is that he manifests green plasma from his imagination and uses them as weapons against someone? Even that in itself if you just imagine then watching a fight scene with a guy who’s like a hundred feet away making plasma manifestations fight someone – it’s not exactly raucous, getting up close and personal.
“The Flash has door handles on the side of his mask and if he doesn’t wear that mask, I’ll be pissed off, you know what I mean? They’re in a weird, weird situation – if you’ve got a guy who moves at the speed of light up against the Weather Wizard and Captain Cold or whatever, then your movie’s over in two seconds.
“You can get away with stuff in comics that in live action’s just a bit sucky – the best one is definitely Aquaman. Aquaman can’t even talk under water. If you think about it in comics it’s fine, you just have a speech balloon, but how do you have Atlantis and people talking under water? Are they gonna talking telepathically? Is it going to be body forms? The actual logistics of each member of the Justice League is disastrous, and you put them all together and I think you get an excellent way of losing $200 million.”
Justice League is due in cinemas 2015. Pick up Superman – The Complete Collection on Blu-ray for £17.75 from Amazon.co.uk.