Sometimes the truth really does feel stranger than fiction. Bring on the news this week that DC is planning a movie about Deathstroke and Bane, a duo so testosterone-fuelled it’s like someone let the two angriest blokes at your local gym start a metal band together.
And yet, times being what they are, we probably shouldn’t be all that baffled. For we live in a reality in which all kinds of super-critters and minor Z-grade comic book heroes have inexplicably achieved their own movies and TV series: it was not so long ago that Thor, a glorified Asgardian lumberjack who occasionally moonlights as a Norse god, was considered a relatively niche costumed titan, while it’s possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of human beings who had heard of Rocket Raccoon prior to James Gunn’s 2014 Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy.
But does that really mean we need a film centred on two musclebound lunks who will probably spend most of the movie bench-pressing each other’s oversized egos? Surely there are better options out there.
Gunn, recently installed as DC’s big cheese, this week debunked rumours that Mr Freeze – yes, the frosty doctor from 1997’s execrable Batman & Robin who’s one lab mishap away from selling slush puppies in a Gotham City park – might be getting his own solo outing. Really? What next – a three-hour epic centred on Brother Power the Geek, the little-known 1960s superhero who began life as a tailor’s dummy and lasted about two issues before being culled for cleaving too closely to the abiding hippy culture of the time? Perhaps they could dig out Condiment King, because nothing says “cinematic masterpiece” like a guy who shoots ketchup and mustard at people. In the grand pantheon of completely preposterous, totally forgettable superheroes there are probably far worse places DC can go, but it is far from certain that they should.
Gunn has made a decent start, albeit before anyone has witnessed a single frame of his new DC revolution, by focusing his new universe around Kal-El himself with the forthcoming Superman: Legacy. But it’s baffling that we’re already digging into the also-rans before we’ve even had the chance to see the comic book publisher’s big beasts drive all before them at the multiplex. What exactly did Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot do wrong, one middling sequel in Wonder Woman 1984 aside, to be cast out of the new DC revolution? Isn’t Aquaman worthy of at least some kind of attempt at reinvention, or is everybody just too terrified to tell Jason Momoa that it’s time to level up, and that casting Nicole Kidman as his mum was the worst idea since letting Harley Quinn babysit the Batcave?
Gunn has at least spotted that no DC universe can ever be complete without great Batman stories, to the extent that we now have two versions of the caped crusader. There’s the Robert Pattinson-essayed version who lives in a Kurt Cobain-inspired Gotham of gorgeously cinematic, Zodiac-inspired minor-chord misery (Matt Reeves’ The Batman). And then there’s his presumably more cheery Batbrother from another universe, who will turn up in the soon-to-be-realised The Brave and the Bold, and might just be able to meet other superheroes without completely ruining the whole vibe.
In many ways this is the perfect solution to the eternal question of Gotham’s dark knight: faced with a choice between plumping for a Christopher Nolan-esque Batman we might imagine inhabiting the real world, and one who meets aliens, neanderthals and Egyptian gods, Gunn has politely chosen … both. DC’s new Elseworlds brand means that’s perfectly fine: nobody is going to complain that Colin Farrell’s grumpy Penguin isn’t going to get any screen time in 2026’s presumably rather more starry-eyed Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, or that Gunn’s proposed Teen Titans movie doesn’t have any Nirvana songs. Joker: Folie à Deux will probably have more to do with Mamma Mia! and Frozen than it does with any other DC superhero movie on the upcoming slate, and that’s fine as long as it’s better than Black Adam.
Gunn’s arrival has imbued this all-new universe with a sense of righteous optimism it probably doesn’t completely deserve, just because it can’t possibly be worse than what went before. And until Legacy turns out to be another stinker, and The Brave and the Bold emerges as the worst superhero flick since Catwoman, we all have the right to believe for a little while longer.
Sure, the Bane and Deathstroke movie might wind up a car crash about angry meathead versions of Statler and Waldorf vying to decide who can imbibe more Weightgain 4000, and The Batman: Par II could be 180 minutes of Pattinson gloomily scribbling lyrics about dead fish on a Post-it note – but they can’t possibly be worse than Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.