Marvel Studios has been fortunate as the public have, by and large, embraced their movies and the many wonderful characters found within; Warner Bros.' DCEU hasn't been quite so lucky, but to be fair, they don't have nearly as many movies under their belt at this point. Still, Marvel's method obviously seems to work and many critics seem to think that Warner Bros. is jumping the gun by launching right into multi-hero epics without giving audiences a chance to appreciate the characters as individuals.
David Ayer's SUICIDE SQUAD introduced close to a dozen new characters to the DCEU in one fell swoop and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 star Chris Pratt told io9 that he believes the film suffered because of it.
I really like all the Warner Bros. movies. I think they’re really cool and I’m not a real tough critic on those movies. But one of the flaws might have been they were introducing too many characters in Suicide Squad. They spent 10 minutes telling us why should we care about these characters, rather than creating trilogies for each character and convincing us to care about the characters.
I'm not sure that each and every member of the SUICIDE SQUAD team needed their own trilogy, but I certainly get where Pratt is coming from. There's only so much you can do in two hours with so many characters to juggle, and it wouldn't have hurt to have known a little more about Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) or some of the others. Chris Pratt went on to give Marvel credit for taking the time it needs in order to develop their franchises.
It’s like hardwood. They grew it really slowly so it’s strong. They didn’t create The Avengers first. They did Iron Man. And they tested it to make sure it worked. Then they did [Iron Man II] and [Iron Man III], then they did Cap, and then they did Thor. And they created a thirst for these characters, and that’s when they put them in The Avengers.
Pratt admits that successfully crafting a major superhero franchise is "really f**king hard to do" and that it's "kind of a miracle that anyone's got it right." Obviously SUICIDE SQUAD has its fans, but even director David Ayer admitted that the movie wasn't without its flaws and wished that he had a time machine to craft a more grounded story. Thankfully the film was successful enough to warrant a sequel, as well as a spinoff featuring Harley Quinn, so I would hope that the lessons learned on SUICIDE SQUAD will be put to good use.
It will be interesting to see where the DCEU goes from here, especially with standalone features centering around Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and Batman (Ben Affleck) on the way. It will be nice to spend some one-on-one time with these characters, and although it seems a little backwards, I would hope that their appearances in the upcoming JUSTICE LEAGUE will fuel the excitement for their solo flicks. We've got two DCEU movies to look forward to this year with WONDER WOMAN hitting theaters on June 2, 2017 and JUSTICE LEAGUE following on November 17, 2017.
What are your thoughts on the state of the DCEU and do you think that SUICIDE SQUAD suffered by introducing so many characters at once?