DCEU News: Details on The Elseworlds Banner, Their New Direction, and DC’s Continuity

DC Entertainment has kind of struggled with the launch of their Cinematic Universe. Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman were mixed at best, Suicide Squad was poorly received, and Wonder Woman was (thankfully) a mega-hit. Abraham Riesman of the Vulture spoke with the creative officer, Geoff Johns about some behind the scenes details. I’ve picked out the things I found most interesting, but for the full story click the link above.

Geoff Johns and Man of Steel

When Man of Steel, DC’s first film in their new cinematic universe came out, it was a completely different situation. One person close to Man of Steel said: “Geoff Johns and Diane Nelson [President of DC Entertainment] were reading scripts, and Geoff Johns, to his credit, was concerned that there was not enough lightness or humor, given who the character is. Geoff definitely raised that point, but that current administration didn’t care that much about what Geoff Johns thought.” After their failed attempt at making a movie that’s not Batman or Superman (Green Lantern), you can see why WB might’ve been hesitant to hear what Johns and company had to say. Things only got worse as Warner CEO, Kevin Tsujihara wanted to go all in on their DC films, announcing an ambitious film slate in 2014, that never came to fruition. Johns has been saying that DC’s DNA is heart, hope, and humor, and we can see he’s been pushing for that from the beginning. If they did lighten up the tone of Man of Steel maybe it would’ve been a bigger hit than it was? After everything that happened with Green Lantern and Man of Steel, Johns, and co. started to climb the ranks in the film division: “It took some work for us to earn our stripes, I think, with the rest of the studio and filmmakers.” Johns said. With a stable brain trust, I’m hopeful the DCEU goes nowhere but up.

DCEU Continuity and Elseworld Stories

With all the rumors and changes surrounding the DC films, Diane Nelson assures us that: “It’s not chaos, It’s intentional.” She added: Our intention, certainly, moving forward is using the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn’t make sense, but there’s no insistence upon an overall storyline or interconnectivity in that universe,” It’s definitely a different approach to what Marvel is doing or even what they did with Batman v Superman. Johns added: “The movie’s not about another movie. Some of the movies do connect the characters together, like Justice League. But, like with Aquaman, our goal is not to connect Aquaman to every movie.” This allows the films to feel more standalone, something director Matt Reeves already confirmed with his Batman movie.

So many rumors have been surrounding DC that it’s hard to keep up with what’s actually true. Johns cleared the air, saying: “Some of the stuff is true, some of it isn’t true when we talk about things or we’re making deals for people to develop scripts or whatever, sometimes, things leak; sometimes, things are misreported, and it’s frustrating. Because we do wanna go out there and talk about what our strategy is, and this stuff just muddies the water. There’s a lot of internal conversations going on about, How do we help kind of clean that up a bit?”

The films will resemble their comic counterparts in a way. The Batman comics have little to no effect on the Superman comics. They exist in the same world but much like our own, they rarely crossover.“Moving forward, you’ll see the DC movie universe being a universe, but one that comes from the heart of the filmmaker who’s creating them.” Nelson said. With the DC universe being more director-driven, WB has been working on an Elseworlds banner. This will allow creators to make films without being held back by continuity. We have more info on that tanks to EW: “They’re outside the mainstream film universe and they feature different actors and worlds and takes on the characters. They’re most likely all going to be one-offs,” Johns says. “We’ll be announcing the name of it soon-ish, but those films and the approach to those films is going to be a very different approach. The Joker is the only picture to date that is under the banner — it’s a very different take on the character, it’s a very different type of movie, and it’s unconstrained by continuity.”

The New Direction

After Batman v Superman, Geoff Johns, and Jon Berg were hired to oversee the DC films. This was probably the darkest time for WB as they released two films that weren’t well received in a five-month span. How can they survive that? Well, it’s something Johns has always believed: “hope and optimism.” Berg was on the same page. “We talk about four things; heart, heroics, humanity, and humor.” This was the turning point for the DCEU. They teamed up with Patty Jenkins (director) and Allan Heinberg (writer) and delivered one of the biggest hits of the year (Wonder Woman). They have one more hurdle to jump with Justice League. They brought in Joss Whedon to help work on the script, and unfortunately, he had to take over the project after Snyder stepped down. It’s a strange situation to say the least but, hopefully, it all works out in the end.

The DC Extended Universe won’t end anytime soon, and it looks like they finally know what they want to do. As a DC fan, I can’t wait to see what’s coming up next. For even more details from the Vulture click here. For everything in the world of DC Entertainment stay tuned.

Justice League hits theaters November 17th.