Not a Dream! Not an Imaginary Story! The Death of the Snyderverse

And it came not a moment too soon

I have always been fascinated by the collapse of the Hollywood studio system that led to the New Hollywood renaissance of the 70s; in the wake of the Paramount Decree which stripped the studios of theater ownership and, faced with a changing audience with changing tastes and up against the rise of television, the major studios simply floundered in the 1960s. The traditional narrative has it all culminate in the disaster of Cleopatra, which led Fox to sell off much of its historic backlot - today that stuff is all ugly office buildings in Century City.

This period fascinated me because not only is it this weird transition between the great period of the Hollywood Golden Age and perhaps the single most exciting decade of American filmmaking, but also because I love a good crash and burn story. This period is a time when they made Clint Eastwood the lead of a fucking musical, for God’s sake - anybody could have seen this mess coming. But the system was too big, too stolid, unable to shift properly in a world that was rapidly changing all around it.

It’s a period that offers a lot of object lessons for us, and especially for Hollywood itself, and for  the past decade or so we’ve been living in a slow motion version of this period. We’ve been living through a time of unprecedented technological change and the rise of streaming but also a time where Hollywood isn’t entirely certain how to reach any audiences anymore and I’ll tell you what - I’m not even sure Hollywood knows how to make movies anymore. I just looked at the top grossing movies of the year and it’s like a list of films I forgot even existed - Uncharted, Lightyear, Secrets of Dumbledore - and movies I am quite certain no one liked - Jurassic World: Dominion. The biggest movie of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, is also the most unashamedly retro movie of the year. It’s a throwback to the kind of movies they used to make in the 80s. No wonder it's huge.

The only films that consistently do well and get cultural traction are superhero movies, but when we say that we really mean Marvel movies. The truth has been for some time that the DC films from Warner Bros have been also-rans at best, and now, this week, we have learned that they are dead, smothered in bed by James Gunn and Peter Safron. It was a mercy killing.

The past ten years of DC movies are, to me, the modern iteration of that period in the 60s when the studios couldn’t stop spending tons of money on movies that people didn’t want to see. This isn’t even a dig at the quality of these movies (although a number of them are quite bad) because I’m one of those guys who will tell you Cleopatra is actually very good. And you look at the scope and the cast of the movie and you kind of get why Fox thought it would hit - but they just didn’t get the zeitgeist. They missed the moment.

That’s the entirety of the DC Expanded Universe - a bunch of movies that kind of miss the zeitgeist. A few have hit; Wonder Woman was probably the biggest cultural impact of all these films, and Aquaman was somehow the biggest success (again, not a dig on the movie, just an acknowledgment that there’s a reason Entourage used an Aquaman movie as a joke), but in general these movies have been a wash. And I mean that artistically and economically.

There’s this legal concept that I think is useful in looking at the now-departed DCEU - fruit of the poison tree. The DCEU was birthed by Zack Snyder, who is a terrific filmmaker. He is an honest-to-god visionary, and he has a natural facility with action filmmaking that puts almost all of his peers to shame. He traffics in bombast and iconography, so you can see why it seemed as though he could be the guy to shape the DC comic book characters as they came to the big screen - in the world of nerds we like to say that the DC characters are a pantheon of gods, as opposed to the feet of clay mortals in the Marvel universe. The problem is that it turned out Snyder didn’t believe in these gods. Zack Snyder doesn’t understand why someone would give of themselves to help another person. He doesn’t understand superheroes.

He could capture the thunderous calamity of godlike beings battling, and he could create almost religious imagery of these characters, but he could never get to their souls. He simply doesn’t share their values; Snyder has long wanted to make a film of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a novel that celebrates an almost insane level of individualism (it’s not as evil as Atlas Shrugged, but Rand was just warming up) that ends with a pigheaded architect committing an act of terrorism. Rand was an Objectivist, a philosophy that is pretty much centered on the self and selfishness. The main values of Ayn Rand and the main values of Superman are completely at odds, and while perhaps a more intellectually rigorous filmmaker could have leapt between the two, Snyder has always operated on a kind of deep artistic instinct. He does not overthink his movies.

If you don’t understand why these gods would help humans you simply can’t make movies about them being heroes. You can definitely make great movies about diffident gods having their internecine battles and intrigues, but that’s what the Greek gods are for. Snyder should have made a Clash of the Titans expanded universe, perhaps - just take 300 and zoom the camera back to the top of Olympus. But this philosophical issue cast a pall over all the movies that would come; wherein Iron Man launches the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the story of an asshole who eventually becomes a hero and renounces his old ways, Man of Steel opens the DCEU with an aloof guy who eventually executes someone. This isn’t to say this Superman story can’t be told - I think the post-Crisis Superman comics told this exact story quite well - but rather that it’s a weird one to open with.

I am not sure that the rest of the films ever fully recovered from this - not as individual films, some of which I quite like, but as a whole. Snyder launched a superhero universe that was really no fun, and the success of the Marvel movies shows that audiences actually wanted some fun. A lot of fun, if we’re being honest. You’d be right to say that few Marvel films have the visual spectacle that Snyder brings to even his worst work, but in the end what the ticket buyers wanted was characters they could love and hang out with. This was not what Snyder was interested in giving us.

The whole Snyder thing fell apart quickly; after the disaster of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (and a side note: this movie was a disaster. Nobody puts Superman and Batman in a movie together intending to make anything less than a billion dollars. This would be like bringing Babe Ruth back from the dead and being satisfied that he hit a couple of doubles) everybody knew there needed to be a change. I was one of a number of journalists flown to the London set of Justice League to be assured that Snyder and company had heard the fans and would be changing course. That never quite got to happen as, through a combination of horrible personal tragedy and corporate moves, Snyder was bounced from the film. Joss Whedon was brought in to finish it and in the process really fucked things up. His movie was a smug mess; eventually Snyder’s four hour cut would surface on streaming and it would be an overblown, tedious mess (one that doubled down on Snyder’s bad instincts, such as a scene where Wonder Woman explodes a bad guy in front of a group of young girls and then acts like it was an inspirational moment).

The movies that came out in the wake of all of this were not bad, necessarily. I mean, Wonder Woman 1984 was a turd, but the first film was great, and James Wan’s Aquaman presented a vision of a DCEU that perhaps should have been there from the beginning - one that was big and fun and full of wonder. Shazam! was a delight. The first Suicide Squad was a work of absolute torture, but James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad really captured what a “dark” DCEU movie should be like. And Birds of Prey was enjoyable, and I thought a good start on what could have grown into an enjoyable franchise. I really believe it should be noted that it’s a miracle these movies were as good as they were, because they were being made as fruit from the poisoned tree but also they were coming from a company that had no vision.

And I don’t mean that in the “Kevin Feige has a twenty year plan” way. I mean that in “Warner Bros, seeing the end of the Harry Potter franchise and the success of Marvel, was desperate to get new tentpoles off the ground and did not spend any real time trying to figure out what would make them work.” Every director who made a good DC movie succeeded against the odds.

But the fact that there were a bunch of pretty good DC movies is what makes this collapse story so interesting; I wouldn’t be as intrigued by the fall of the studio system if Cleopatra wasn’t good! It’s easy to see why bad films don’t work, but when the work itself is decent or passable you find yourself looking at a weird systemic issue that brought it all down. I am not this guy, but I do hope that someone someday writes a real book about all of this. And when I say a real book, I mean not something like the embarrassing cheerleaderism of Release the Snyder Cut: An Insider Look at the Lost Justice League Movie, a book that valorizes an online movement of trolls and bad faith actors (I think that there is a lot of blame to be laid at the feet of these people, by the way - in the new world of social media and direct audience feedback their consistent stochastic terrorism really clouded the waters for Warner Bros, who believed these weirdos represented a bigger slice of the audience than they actually did).

But now the whole thing is dead. I think that any discussion about whether or not the Snyderverse was a success must end here - Warner Bros would not bring in new guys and allow them to euthanize a decade-long semi-interconnected franchise if the thing has been a success. Capitalism doesn’t care about quality and new WB CEO David Zaslav, who came to the company from ruining the Discovery Channel, doubly doesn’t care about quality. They care about the bottom line and the bottom line was that the future of these films was a losing one, so they’re basically starting over.

What is especially satisfying, from a dramatic perspective, is how this all ended. When the history is written it’s going to be Black Adam as the capstone to the Snyderverse; while there are more films yet to come, it’s really Black Adam who put the whole thing in the ground. It’s been wild watching it all happen - Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson spent a good decade developing this movie and the past year bragging that it was going to change the face of the DCEU, and he was certainly not wrong. The movie opened with a whimper; it seems likely that even as Johnson was running around talking about how he was the future of DC Zaslav was meeting with Gunn and Safran about the real future of DC.

And it got nuts this week; clearly knowing that Wonder Woman 3 was canned and knowing that Gunn and Safran were looking to start fresh (ish), Johnson took to Twitter to proclaim that Black Adam had, despite buzz to the contrary, actually made money. It had made, he said, like 30 to 70 million in profit. This was amazing on a few levels - one is that nobody spends 200 plus million dollars to earn 30 million. That’s crazy. But what was even more amazing is that nobody runs around saying how much their film earned, because studio accounting is one of the most arcane of all the black magicks. Look at the Buchwald v Paramount lawsuit, wherein Art Buchwald sued Paramount for stealing his idea for Coming to America; the important part of the lawsuit came when it was determined that Paramount used “Hollywood Accounting” to avoid paying participants in movies. Hollywood Accounting is a way of making it look like a movie never turns a profit so that people who have back end deals and profit participation don’t have to be paid a dime. The studios will argue that huge hit movies released twenty years ago have still not recouped their budgets, which is why nobody involved is getting sent any checks. It’s all bullshit, of course, but when the Rock busted out profit numbers on Black Adam publicly I imagine more than one person with profit participation perked up. I wonder how that’s going to play out in the future.

But the Rock did that to a) soften the damage to his personal brand that the weakness of Black Adam caused and b) try to get ahead of news that there would never be a Black Adam 2 by making it seem like Warner Bros was leaving money on the table. In a saga that has had a lot of backstage wheeling and dealing and intrigue (remember the Rolling Stone story this summer that claimed Snyder worked with the Snyder Cut people to convince WB that they should give him lots of money to finish his version of Justice League by creating a false groundswell of demand?) this might have been the most surprising and out there move yet. And honestly, it’s fitting that it ended this way, with a desperate appeal to a shrinking fanbase.

I don’t know what Gunn and Safran will do; Gunn took to Twitter today to warn that maybe nobody does yet. They’re still figuring it out. But whatever they do, it’s certain to look very different from the past ten years. He’s been very vocal about creating a ten year plan that has coherence, and from what I know of Gunn I believe he’s going to create a plan that includes a lot of different viewpoints and perspectives. There are people who believe he’s going to make the DC movieverse into just an extended Peacemaker riff, but there’s no way that’s happening (by the way, Peacemaker is the best thing to come out of the DCEU… by a huge margin). Gunn gets it, and he gets the characters and the universe. He’s going to bring in a lot of different people to do their own takes on these characters, and I guarantee the marching orders will be something along the lines of: they’re huge characters, but they care. They can have darkness, but they’re ultimately good. They can have turmoil and pain, but it has to be offset by fun. And most of all, these are the greatest superheroes in the history of the medium - let’s treat them like it.

The Snyderverse is dead, but we all know that in comics nothing actually stays dead. There has been a nerdy cultural argument happening since the release of Man of Steel that will not end just because the Snyderverse has. If anything the coming changes will give the arguments a jolt of life. But if you’ll permit me a grand, perhaps delusional thought here: the rise of the Snyderverse and its aggressive, death threat-tossing online fanbase was happening at around the same time as the growing menace of GamerGate and general online right wing trolling; I look back and see all of these trends of harassment and hatred online as precursors to the rise of Trump and his extremely-online cadre of racist fascist enablers. But over the past year I’ve begun to see a bit of a rolling back of this high tide of hate; a lot of it has been at the ballot box, but it’s also begun to happen in the very online spaces from which these creatures crawled. I wonder if the end of the Snyderverse, the buttoning up of that era of pop culture, does not represent another turning of the wheel away from where we have been for the past decade. I wonder is this isn’t another sign that we may have weathered at least this particular storm. Again, I know it’s grand and possibly delusional, but it gives me hope. And that’s the thing that Zack Snyder didn’t fully grasp when he launched his take on the DC superheroes: they’re supposed to give us hope.