Well, first I hope that Superman and Lois is safe and will migrate to HBOMax. I also hope that the proposed GL Corps show makes it through the change over of ownership.
And my biggest wish would be a period piece JSA series set right at the outbreak of World War II
Oh, and for the love of God, can we get The Adventures of Superman to start streaming on HBOMax?!
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But, in terms of a show, a We are Robin show would be great. But I’m sure higher ups would want the ‘bigger name’ Robins involved, instead of this Crew how they started, before the 4 main Robins showed up to help them out in Robin War.
Oh yeah, no doubt, I agree about bigger name Robins.
Assuming that the Batgirl movie is going to introduce the Multiverse with multiple Earths, then there’s your “in.”
EDIT: Or the The Flash movie I guess is what will introduce multiple Earths or whatever…
Anyway, just create an Earth with Duke teamed up with Damian and maybe Tim. Maybe even throw in Stephanie (and Cassandra, even though she wasn’t a Robin). I suppose you can have a Carrie Kelley too if you want… why not? 
Maybe take a page from “Future State” and have Jason be the bad guy. Or someone different, it doesn’t matter.
And if we want to do the future, there’s nothing that says we can’t have a Terry McGinnis character.
I should probably reread it to be sure, because I haven’t read it since last year, but what they did with Duke in the “Future State” was somewhat interesting to me… I think. I probably should reread it, but I seem to remember it being kind of interesting to me. That take on The Signal was something that I can live with.
But yeah, to keep the Robin fans from rioting it would be wise to just throw most of the Robins in there and be done with it. And then it really can be a “We Are Robin” type of thing, at least in name.
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@ds090ddsl, why do you think GL would be a tough sell outside of the Ryan Reynolds movie?
I’d see those
Yes, please
When I heard Snyder’s plans for other movies, it kind of lost me
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It’d never in a million years happen, but imagine if someone took the time to turn the 99 JSA run into a series. There’d be enough existing material for there to be several seasons. I honestly think it’d work better as an animated series than a live-action one. I think it’d be better geared toward teen or older audiences, but still, something that families might be able to let younger ones watch depending on their maturity level. It’d just be key to have writers adapting the ‘screenplay’ that know and love the material it would be based on. That’s usually where Warner falls flat…in adaptation and casting. At least if it’s animation casting could be about who would be best at playing the role and not whether they look the part, or are the ‘it’ actor at the moment.
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A JSA series would be great, although considering that it would be a period piece, the people in charge may decide it to be too costly. I agree with you on Adventures of Superman, and I would add the Filmation Batman series from the 60s as well.
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@ds090ddsl, why do you think GL would be a tough sell outside of the Ryan Reynolds movie?
I feel that way simply from looking at the property.
Green Lantern has been around since the late 50’s and he’s had one not very successful movie attempt, and I guess technically two unsuccessful animation attempts. Although, the 1967 cartoon was only three episodes, I believe, and they were 7-minute shorts. So that’s not like a real attempt like the 2012 animated series on the Cartoon Network that was cancelled after one season.
Also, the Green Lantern comic sales have never really set the world on fire. Yes, Geoff Johns’ run was popular for a few years, but that’s really been about it for Green Lantern.
Well, the Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams run was also noteworthy too, of course…
And yes, Hal Jordan has a rapid fanbase, but that doesn’t really translate to much. It’s just a small, passionate fanbase.
Speaking of the Ryan Reynolds movie: was he the problem with it or was it the story? Or just a combination of many things?
I’ve never seen the movie and never had any desire to see it. I’m trying to think if I’ve even watched the trailer to it. I imagine I probably did but I don’t remember it.
Either way, Green Lantern is simply just a concept that I don’t feel that works well because it doesn’t seem like it ever has. And that’s not to say that it can never work, but I would imagine that you would have to change some (and maybe quite a few) things in order to get it to work. And in doing so you may run the risk of alienating your small core audience who like Green Lantern as is…
Money is also another consideration. How much money would it take to make a Green Lantern movie “the right way”? I would guess closing in on $300 million, because I don’t think you can do Green Lantern on the cheap. So if you’re talking that kind of money, you better have a damn good story.
The “delay” in the HBO Max series may have to do with money considerations too. I remember reading in interviews about how ambitious they were with the series, about how they wanted to make it almost cinematic. So I’m guessing they were talking well over $20 million an episode.
With Discovery now owning Warner Bros. they may have said let’s put a pause on this while we take another look. Another look at what would be a Green Lantern series without Hal Jordan, that would cost a ton of money to make.
So yeah, to sum up: I think Green Lantern is a hard concept to sell because it’s never been wildly successful in the past, and to do it today would cost an enormous amount of money.
I’m also of course of the mindset that the only thing the DC has that sells is Batman… and Superman a little bit, and maybe Wonder Woman. And that’s it, that’s the list. And everything else they have just exists. And history has led me to feel this way.
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That was often the best selling comic during his 10 year run.
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I don’t see how it would be considered a ‘period’ piece when only a couple of decades have passed since the material was written. Outside of maybe a bit of advancement in technology, the world isn’t all that hugely different from the early 2000s.
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That was often the best selling comic during his 10 year run.
The word “often” is just a bit overstated, I believe. I would say more like three times during his run it was a best selling comic.
If I’m not mistaken, it was a Top-10 book for about it’s first year, and then it settled down. By it’s 11th issue it was well out of the Top-10, coming in at number #18, and it stayed largely out of the Top-20 for the next few of years until the “Blackest Knight” and “Brightest Day” events. And those two events catapulted Green Lantern back to the top.
GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH and the first year of the new series that launched out of it did well, but the sales soon came back down to Earth. And then spiked again with the aforementioned events, and once those events were over, and after Geoff Johns left, that was about it.
So in 2005 and 2006 Green Lantern did well, then again in 2009 to about 2011 or 2012. So for a few years… like I said.
And it’s not bad, a little over three years (of a seven-or-so year run) of having Green Lantern be a top selling book. No one else has done better with the character.
And of course this is Green Lantern we’re talking about here, not Batman.
Batman, since probably DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, has largely been DC’s best selling comic, with only a few dips here and there – like when you kill Superman or something, or relaunch a character in Green Lantern’s case, or have a big event.
So for over 35 years Batman has been it. Batman is what’s often been the best selling comic at DC, and that’s been the case for a number of decades.
I understand what you’re saying though, I’m just being nitpicky.
A statement like: “Scott Snyder’s Batman was often the best selling comic during his nine or ten-year run” is something that largely goes without question. But then again, it’s Batman.
A statement like that with Green Lantern is like… "well, let’s look at that for a second… "
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I have thought about this quite a bit. The early issues have a few mentions of recent movies by Starman and Sandman, and Stargirl mentions The Backstreet Boys. Those would all be easy to update or replace with other references.
The major themes questions posed are about issues like deposing dictators, and it seems to be against America doing that. The only problem with putting that in today is it now the typical public opinion, while at the time it was the opposite. Chaos vs order and passing the torch are simply timeless issues.
They would probably demand they change the part where a terrorist organization hijacks a plain and kills everybody on it, but that can be adapted in many ways.
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For every person out there who likes Batman, there is another person like me that’s a little tired of everything having to be Bat-centric. Personally I’m a little tired of DC only wanting to use the same handful of overused characters in everything. I was actually quite looking forward to the Green Lantern series…it would have been nice to finally have something different for a change.
The thing that’s bored me out of seeing a lot of DC movies, is that I get tired of an endless cycle of origin stories, just redone with different actors every handful of years.
Some of the CW shows like Flash and Legends have been drug out so long, that they seemed to be either running out of story to tell, or just grew more and more convoluted as the writers ran out of material to draw from. There’s nothing wrong at that point with taking a short season if offered to wind things towards a satisfying ending. Some shows are going to have more lasting power than others.
But those are just some of my pet peeves…
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For every person out there who likes Batman, there is another person like me that’s a little tired of everything having to be Bat-centric. Personally I’m a little tired of DC only wanting to use the same handful of overused characters in everything.
Yeah, I personally wasn’t much of a Batman fan until the last couple of years.
The Joker movie, and then The Batman, is what got me onboard. And that’s because they finally did those characters in a way that was interesting to me; and made sense to me.
I still don’t read the mainline Batman comics, just select Black Label ones, because the mainline ones don’t really interest me all that much. But they sell, of course, and that’s all that a for profit company cares about.
And naturally they use the same handful of characters over and over again because that’s what sells.
When I started following the sales of comics in the early 80’s, X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman were like the biggest things. Fast forward to today… and it’s more or less the same thing.
I wished that Vertigo was huge and sold tons of comics. But alas, a whole lot more people bought Batman comics than Vertigo comics, and as a result Vertigo is no more.
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@ds090ddsl, the only way to judge if you like the movie is to see it
Oh, I make no judgment on the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie. I have no idea whether it was good or bad, I simply had no interest in seeing the movie.
I recently watched the trailer to the upcoming Green Lantern animated movie starring John Stewart. After seeing that I have absolutely zero interest in seeing that too. It may be good or it may not be, I don’t care either way.
I’m not much of a fan of the DC animated stuff anyway, so…
I’m more of an anime guy…
And I do judge things by their trailer, insofar as whether I want to see them or not. If I don’t like the trailer then I’m not going to see the movie or TV series. And I assume most people are like that, aren’t they…
A teaser is even sometimes enough. All of the teasers that they showed at DC FanDome last year for their upcoming movies, I already know that I don’t want to see any of those. I don’t even need to see the trailers, the teasers were more than enough.
But in all fairness, I had no interest in seeing Black Adam and the Flash, and Aquaman and Shazam to begin with, so…
On the flip side, it’s very rare that if I do like a trailer and then in turn don’t like the movie. It happens every once in a while, but rarely. (And I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but it’s happened I’m sure.)
And sometimes you only kind of like the trailer and then only kind of like the movie or TV series.
The recent Blade Runner series was that way for me.
I don’t know why I’m on a Blade Runner kick today. I guess I’m still puzzled as to why the live-action Blade Runner series is going to be on Amazon and not HBO Max. Why would Warner Bros. let that go somewhere else? Anyway…
A quick amendment to the “trailer rule”: something like the upcoming Penguin show on HBO Max, the spin-off from The Batman, I know I’m going to watch that whether I like the trailer or not. And that’s because I already have an interest in it.
Chances are I’m going to like whatever they do with the trailer, but I already know I’m going to watch that show regardless.
Never knew there was a Blade Runner series coming
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Yep, set 50 years after the last movie…
I really liked the original Blade Runner back when it came out, and I loved Blade Runner 2049. In fact, Blade Runner 2049 is one of the few movies that I saw in the theater more than once.
It didn’t do that great at the box office though, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that Warner Bros. let it go to a competing streaming service.
Or Amazon may have outbid them for it… I really haven’t looked into it.
Interesting that the animated Blade Runner: Black Lotus was on Warner Bros. owned Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network (and now on HBO Max), but the live-action series is going out of house.
It’s a bit of head-scratcher to me.
Not on the same level of Warner Bros. allowing Sandman to go to Netflix, because that was like… “What!? How do you allow something like Sandman go somewhere else?” But the Blade Runner thing is a curious call to me nonetheless.
Anyway, I guess I’ll subscribe to Amazon when it comes out. (That’s why I wanted it to come to HBO Max, so I wouldn’t have to subscribe to another service.)
And with that, back to DC stuff…
Batman: Caped Crusader is definitely on my radar. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, but this Batman: Caped Crusader sounds really good to me.
EDIT: And yeah, I forgot, Ed Brubaker of GOTHAM CENTRAL fame is coming onboard…
…so good.
I think WB would be making a big mistake to have tons of DC TV shows and have none of them on network television. They’d do well to keep Superman/Lois and Stargirl on broadcast TV.
However, cheapness (at least in comparison to shows like Gotham and Constantine) was one of the hallmarks of the Arrowverse. The Arrowverse worked out extremely well for years. Without all the Batwoman-bashing, it might have enjoyed a few more, but it was never going to last forever. So they are wise to take steps to keep DC from getting a reputation for low-budget content
If delaying the upcoming movies for reshoots improves their quality, then that was a great call. They’ve got all these films, none of which headline the big three, coming up and so they are really swinging for the fences in 2022. They shouldn’t be throwing them out in theaters just to hit a target date. The fact that Shazam got moved way up in the line-up presumably means they were happy with what they saw of those rushes.
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So the Wonder Twins news is official now…
A key take away for me is this…
Sources say the decision to shut the project down occurred several weeks ago. According to insiders, the leadership of Warner Bros. Discovery, the new company combining Discovery and Warner Bros. and now being led by CEO David Zaslav, is imposing a mandate that DC movies should now be made with a theatrical-first goal. Wonder Twins , the way it had been conceived, was “too niche,” said one source.
At the same time, one source said the budget was too high for what is considered an HBO Max movie. Twins was looking at a $75 million budget, but according to sources, Zaslav wants to keep HBO Max original movies $35 million and under. He has concluded that higher-budgeted offerings do not add enough value, i.e., add a significant number of subscribers, and more modestly budgeted movies seem to do the job of retaining subs. Original theatrical movies, however, do a gangbusters job of attracting subscribers, The Batman being a huge hit for the service, according to several sources.
“A lot of things that were developed are going to go away,” said another insider, referring to the broader scrutiny that is coming to the slates of many Warners divisions, including film.
Yep, that’s not too surprising.
Street-level characters you can do “cheaply,” other ones though not so much.
So yep… get ready for a ton of Batman stuff.
Because the new bosses do not want to spend a ton of money, and with Batman and Batman-adjacent stuff you don’t have to – and there would really be no reason to spend a lot of money on special effects or anything like that for Batman, it doesn’t really fit the character.
I’m thinking, what other street-level characters would I want to see other than Bat-people…
I guess the Question is a pretty popular choice with people. I’d want to see that too. And I guess if they were to go with Renee Montoya then there’s your Batman connection.
Anyway, I guess we now have an idea of the landscape moving forward. They’ll spend the money on the movies, but they will not break the bank with HBO Max stuff. And I suppose that’s a pretty reasonable strategy…
Oh, and this part again…
“A lot of things that were developed are going to go away,” said another insider, referring to the broader scrutiny that is coming to the slates of many Warners divisions, including film.
Yep, the Black Superman movie is probably gone. Sad to me if it doesn’t happen, but changes are not surprising when you get new ownership.
I’m sure they’ll come up with something else that I’ll like even more, so no real worries…
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