While Marvel has spent the last few years really getting their act together and ensuring that as many of its superheroes made it onto the screen as possible, DC Comics characters have tended to languish, with films rolling very slowly off the production line. Even those franchises that are up and running have been moving at a snail’s pace, with large gaps between Batman films and a sequel to Superman Returns still trapped in development hell.
Realising they needed to get their act together, Warner Bros. has now taken over the running of DC Comics and renamed it DC Entertainment, with the plan to continue pushing its publishing operations, but also to find new ways to exploit the comic characters on both the big and small screen. Warner executive Diane Nelson, who has masterminded the studio’s management of the Harry Potter franchise, has been brought in to run the company, taking over from Paul Levitz.
Although this may look like a knee-jerk reaction to the fact Disney is busy buying Marvel, it’s actually been in the work for ages. According to Nikki Frinke, for several months Warner and DC have been quietly taking back various comic book movies that were in development with different producers and units all over the place, so that they can have more control over them and actually push them through and get them onto the screen, rather than waiting for others to get their act together.
The net result is that rather than people just talking about making more DC movies, such as the ten-year odyssey to get Wonder Woman on the big screen, or the Justice League Of America film that got a lot of people excited only to disappear off the radar, we should actually get more of these characters onto the screen. One of Nelson’s first jobs is to come up with an overall release and marketing strategy, in order to plan exactly what will be happening with various characters over the next few years. It’s certainly something that’s long overdue and should mean a less chaotic approach to mining DC characters.