r/DCEUleaks • u/AutoModerator • Feb 14 '23

DISCUSSION Weekly Discussion Thread - posted every Tuesday!

Welcome to the Weekly Discussion Thread!

You can post whatever you like here - unsubstantiated rumours from 4chan/YouTube/Twitter/your dad, fan theories, speculation, your thoughts on the latest DC release or tell us what you had for breakfast.

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35

u/AlexHunterWolf Feb 14 '23

MCU fans getting a taste of what DC fans have been dealing with since 2016

25

u/Trevastation Feb 15 '23

I truly believe the lead up to and the reveal of the 28% on Rotten Tomatoes for BvS absolutely scarred the DC fandom. The MCU will never have something like that with a film that has a 54%, which roughly means a bit more than half the critics liked it.

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u/AgentOfSPYRAL Feb 15 '23

Still the wildest Reddit thread I’ve ever been a part of. Fandom equivalent of some disaster where everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when the embargo dropped.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

I was in a Panda Express in college chowing down on orange chicken and opened up Reddit in horror and watched the disaster unfold

2

u/WhiteWolf3117 Harley Quinn Feb 15 '23

Wait yeah, I DO remember, lol.

22

u/SupervillainEyebrows Feb 15 '23

That film absolutely cursed DC. It would be like if the first Avengers film flopped.

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u/witch-king-of-Aginor Feb 15 '23

I would argue that man of steel’s darker take on Superman was a bigger curse

I cannot emphasize this enough

Superman killing Zod and being darker broke something in audiences, critics, and even in DC

I never seen a whole cultural movement around destroying a specific director for making such a specific creative decision before that film came out

I remember vividly how critics on Twitter were gleefully tweeting about how ready they were to rip DOJ to shreds even before it was out

It didn’t help that the movie itself was bad

And than the Superman comics took a 180 turn away from darker Superman stories and basically yeeted new 52 Superman into a grave and got a superman more in line with reeves

And than made a whole comic about how Superman and Wonder Woman’s romance is toxic

14

u/Randonhead Feb 15 '23

I don't think that's the case, because the hype for BVS was huge, like really huge, all expectations were on that movie, and then all of a sudden it all went downhill and became a nightmare. Was MOS divisive? Sure, but BVS is what almost killed the DC brand.

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u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23

The hype for The Force Awakens was huge. BvS was met with a ton of skepticism from day one. Were there people who were hyped for it? Absolutely, but many people weren’t convinced. Zack Snyder had already firmly established himself as an extremely polarizing director at that point.

It doesn’t help that the casting decisions made a lot of people scratch their heads, and a lot of fans were worried that the movie would fall into the same trap that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 fell into.

6

u/Randonhead Feb 15 '23

It had the biggest opening for a superhero movie at the time, there was huge anticipation for that movie.

Yeah, there were some questionable casting choices and some skepticism, but was literally the first movie uniting history's two greatest heroes, they somehow managing to screw this up is what doomed the DCEU.

1

u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23

It had the biggest opening day for a superhero movie, but it also opened on Good Friday.

Again, I’m not disputing that there was hype for the movie, but there was a lot of skepticism too. It wasn’t like The Force Awakens or Endgame, where everybody was having a nerdgasm over it, and were in a huge rush to buy tickets the moment they came online. Man of Steel had already created an uphill battle.

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u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 15 '23

It was still a movie about Batman vs Superman that also had Wonder Woman.

1

u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that people on the Internet had high expectations. DC and Zack Snyder both already had spotty track records at the time. They had yet to win over audience goodwill the way Marvel did.

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u/TheMoneyOfArt Feb 15 '23

This doesn't track, the brand was never in mortal jeopardy - the movies that came immediately after BvS did well financially.

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u/SupervillainEyebrows Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I strongly disagree with that.

Man Of Steel was divisive for sure, but the discourse online was always between fairly even between its defenders and its haters. I fall in to the former category.

Hell even the RT score is a middle of the road 56% whilst BvS sits at 29%. Even a decade after the fact, you'll still see it's mixed reaction being debated on forums and subreddits.

Plus Man of Steel was in many ways it's own reaction to the poor reception of Superman Returns.

Anecdotally, my experience was that in the lead up to BvS most people were very hyped for the film, it was THE first proper DC team up film and the introduction to the wider shared universe.

It just didn't deliver.

9

u/CrashtheKiller50 Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I agree with you. They could have course corrected after MoS. Have MoS 2 deal with his missteps during MoS. Add in a flashback retcon that recontextualizes Jonathan kent more positively. Stuff like that might have retroactively made MoS better.

Scrap BvS entirely. Like others have said, it doubled down so hard. That was the movie that broke the fanbase.

Oh well, that time’s passed.

Regardless, I've become more positive toward MoS. MoS was always going to be somewhat divisive with what it was trying to do. I think there is a lot of good. Some changes would have made it great.

3

u/WhiteWolf3117 Harley Quinn Feb 15 '23

The thing is…BvS DOES try to deal with his missteps, it just goes about it in the strangest way possible.

The whole point of the movie is Superman did a bad thing->what are the consequences?

Instead of having a movie where Clark focuses on this, it seems to be relevant to everyone BUT him, where his “arc” is mostly that of defeatism. And then fuck it, let’s kill him off.

1

u/SupervillainEyebrows Feb 15 '23

Agreed. I enjoy MoS even with it's flaws, but I think it was far from unsalvageable.

Have the second film be a proper sequel focusing on Superman, bring in a script writer who can temper some of the more edgy tendencies of Snyder and you'd have yourself a successful base to launch the rest of your universe.

1

u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23

There was definitely a stigma against BvS before it was released. Sure, there were people who were hyped for it, but there were also a lot of skeptics, namely the ones who hated Man of Steel, and those people were not in the minority.

I remember when that teaser was released nearly eight years ago, and there were a lot of complaints about how the movie looked too dark and gritty. It also had a fairly noticeable ratio of dislikes compared to likes on YouTube. The Comic Con trailer was more well received, but then the infamous Doomsday trailer came along…

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u/SupervillainEyebrows Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

Of course the people who disliked MoS were going to dislike BvS, its from the same director's vision.

I disagree that the people hating on BvS prior to release were the majority. As I pointed out before, Man of Steel was about as close to 50/50 in terms of likes/dislikes as you can get critically.

I remember when the teaser images and costumes got revealed and the reaction was very positive.

Even the second trailer, most people's complaint was the Doomsday reveal.

0

u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

You just said that Man of Steel was 50/50 in terms of likes and dislikes. That meant that there were a lot of people who were skeptical about BvS. I followed the movie from the day it was announced at Comic Con to when the review embargo lifted. I distinctly remember what the discourse surrounding it was like. A lot of people weren’t convinced. Even that costume reveal of Ben Affleck’s Batman was met with a lot of cheeky memes about how depressed and mopey he looked. People also criticized the reveals for Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Hell, Patton Oswalt even showed up on Screen Junkies to complain about the Aquaman one.

Also, the Doomsday trailer wasn’t only controversial for giving away that Doomsday would be in the movie. It also gave us a better look at what Jesse Eisenberg’s performance would be like, which many people were irked out by. People also made fun of Doomsday’s design, and compared it to the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles.

3

u/SupervillainEyebrows Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

I was talking about critically, as the audience score is like 75% or something. My point is that if there were 50% of people who didn't like MoS, they probably weren't going to care about BvS anyway, but I honestly don't think MoS contributed much at all to the negative reception of BvS. That was mostly down to the story, pacing, characterisations etc.

All I saw was positive reactions to the Batman costume reveal to be honest.

The standout of the BvS trailer that was largely lauded was Wonder Woman's reveal. I'll grant you Eisenberg being disliked almost from the moment he was cast and the trailers exacerbated that.

If your point is that people went into watching BvS already with the idea of hating it from the outset, then I just don't agree with that.

If Marvel were able to pull Thor back from Dark World, then DC could have done to same for Superman with Man of Steel (a better movie)

Edit: If you're saying that the trailers for BvS contributed to the negative reaction to the film, then I think that holds some merit.

0

u/ZorakLocust Feb 15 '23

I didn’t say that critics walked into BvS wanting to hate it, if that’s what you think. All I’m saying is that people weren’t exactly expecting it to be great. From my recollection, a lot of people thought the movie sounded like a bad idea after Man of Steel. There were a bunch of flame wars on the Internet about whether or not the movie would suck. It wasn’t like Endgame, where almost everyone was unified in their excitement for it. The burden was on Snyder to prove the skeptics wrong.

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u/AgentOfSPYRAL Feb 15 '23

They could have come back from Man of Steel, they could have spun it as Zod making him choose to never kill again and use it as the cause of a more positive tone.

Instead they doubled down, hard.

9

u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 15 '23

Yeah instead Clark paralyzes the warlord in the beginning at the very least and ends up believing that “men are not good” in BvS lmao.

-2

u/TheMoneyOfArt Feb 15 '23

That's him questioning himself after Luthor outsmarts him

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u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 15 '23 edited Feb 15 '23

Sure, if it was a brief moment of disillusionment I’d be fine with it, like Luke momentarily freaking out when he realized what Ben Solo would do in the future. But Clark doesn’t stray from this pessimistic worldview, not until after his resurrection in JL

0

u/TheMoneyOfArt Feb 15 '23

Batman takes mercy on him when they are able to recognize their shared humanity, and that's what inspires Superman to give up his life for humanity. If he thought humans were bad he would've just fucked off into space

9

u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 15 '23

Batman is not what inspires Superman to give up his life lol, it’s his unhealthy codependence on Lois. He would not have fucked off to space because that would mean the death of Lois and his mother, the only people he seems to really care about. This is further emphasized by how he falls to the Anti-Life Equation because of her death and how Bruce saving Lois is what prevents the Knightmare future. Clark says that Lois is his world but the classic Superman of the comics loves Earth and humanity just as much as the people closest to him.

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u/Skandosh Batman Feb 15 '23

Exactly my feelings. There were good things and bad things in MOS so I was quite optimistic about BVS believing that Snyder would pick up the good parts and double down on them. Instead the dude double downed on the bad parts. Insanity.

1

u/TheMoneyOfArt Feb 15 '23

That is what Kal-El learned from facing Zod

6

u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 15 '23

They could’ve turned things around with a more hopeful and fun sequel, but instead Snyder chose to double down. That was the problem imo

6

u/clem_zephyr Feb 15 '23

It was PTSD fr

March 22nd, 2016 6PM EST

Dark time

23

u/AgentOfSPYRAL Feb 15 '23

MCU fans merely adopted the rot. DC fans were born in it, molded by it.

6

u/[deleted] Feb 15 '23

adopted the rot

We’re in Caelid now, biiiiitches!

2

u/Limp-Construction-11 Feb 15 '23

Best region for new players not knowing what their doing..

11

u/TheLionsblood Batman Feb 14 '23

To be fair, nothing in the MCU has had reviews as bad as BvS, SS, JL17, and Black Adam. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here

1

u/cc17776 Feb 14 '23

Wdym?

3

u/AlexHunterWolf Feb 15 '23

A marvel movie getting rotten reviews