What Was the DCEU?

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The DC Extended Universe—the film series colloquially known as the DCEU, featuring superhero characters from DC Comics, including Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman—spent its tenth anniversary year releasing a record four features in a 12-month span, culminating just before Christmas with the debut of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, a direct sequel to their biggest-ever hit. During that same 12 months, audiences largely rejected all four movies, executives turned their attention to a full reboot commencing in 2025, and DC’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery shunted most of its DCEU catalog titles off the Max streaming service and temporarily licensed them to Netflix. Congratulations, everyone! Go home and wait for James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy!

This will strike many as the perfect ending to the DCEU, long regarded as the gang that couldn’t punch straight compared to their rivals over at Marvel, which until recently maintained a near-perfect record of critically appreciated (or at least tolerated) commercial hits. Yet before the pandemic, the DCEU’s own track record wasn’t especially shabby, at least in terms of producing big box-office numbers. Yes, Justice League did about half the business it was supposed to, and at least a couple other big titles became instant punchlines. But 2018’s Aquaman—a standalone undersea fantasy about a burly fish-man, to be clear—made a billion dollars worldwide. Wonder Woman was a beloved smash, the biggest domestic grosser of its year. Hell, Suicide Squad may not be anyone’s favorite antihero romp recut by a trailer company, but its grosses landed right between Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming. This is a film series that ran for a full decade and produced 15 features. Until this year, most of them were hits, or good movies, and sometimes both. By most non-Marvel standards, this should constitute a success.

So what went wrong? Was it Warner’s early decision to cede so much control to Zack Snyder (300), who set up an anguished version of Superman in Man of Steel and then pitted him against a particularly aggro incarnation of the Caped Crusader in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice? Or was it their panicked subsequent decision to wrest back that control after Batman v. Superman failed to become an Avengers-level touchstone, resulting in a “lighter,” Joss Whedon-rewritten Justice League movie at war with itself? Was it any or all of the scattered decisions that followed, as DC movies avoided the clean progression of the various Marvel sub-series that seemed to form mini-trilogies and all-star team-ups like magic? Did the existence of wholly unrelated, auteur-y DC projects like Todd Phillips’ Joker and Matt Reeves’ The Batman—movies that take place in entirely different universes from both the main-line DCEU projects and each other—undermine the more interconnected projects?

Yes and no, on all counts. It’s impossible to fully extricate the went-wrongs from the went-rights in DC’s last decade of movies—because the whole series, as it turns out, is a tribute to the messy impossibility of building a better superhero movie.

The oft-remarked difference between the DCEU movies and their Marvel equivalents is that Marvel movies tend to be about characters wrestling with the question of how best to use their amazing abilities to help people, while DC’s heroes are more concerned with whether or not to bother with superpowered heroism at all. That’s most pronounced in the early, Snyder-driven movies, which—in true Snyder fashion—play like deconstructions of what hasn’t actually been constructed yet. In Man of Steel, Superman (Henry Cavill) agonizes over whether to reveal himself to the world, with his father urging him to keep his powers a secret for his own safety; in Batman v. Superman, Batman (Ben Affleck) agonizes over whether his campaign against disorder has been successful, and takes out his frustrations on criminals and also Superman, who he attempts to murder. (In retrospect, Affleck as a rich guy attempting to modulate his self-disgust is pretty killer casting.)

The theme persists, however, even without Snyder. It’s best explored in Wonder Woman, where Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) decides to ignore her sisters’ warnings and leave Themyscira to enter the world of man, and in Aquaman, as Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) ultimately fights to keep the peace between the surface-dwelling humans and the secret undersea kingdom he’s initially reluctant to lead. It’s also the most interesting element of the time-travel dilemma presented in The Flash, where compulsively tinkering with the past results in a multiverse’s worth of screw-ups and resentments. This internal-conflict-via-external-outlandishness wasn’t confined to so-called “meta-humans” with godlike powers, either. Even at the end of his origin story, Blue Beetle scarcely seems to know what to do with his biologically-fused supersuit, beyond protecting the family he already loves. And who’s a better poster gal for the debate over do-gooding than Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), a good-girl-turned-bad-turned-maybe-good-again, with no supernatural abilities beyond her irreverence towards heroes and villains alike?

Variations on a theme do not a successful film series make—though they’re not necessarily its undoing, either; while “With great power comes great responsibility” originates with Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, lots of other Marvel pictures have explored that dichotomy, the superhero version of work/life balance. The DCEU movies tend to be most compelling when their heroes’ supersized reluctance feels like it dovetails with the filmmakers designing it. I’m not suggesting that the directors employed by the DCEU approached the material with contempt or even ambivalence toward superheroes; for all of his dopey ideas about them, Zack Snyder didn’t go back and make his four-hour fan-dream version of Justice League because he hates these characters. There is, however, some visible tension between Snyder luxuriating in the splash-panel coolness of his heroes’ powers, and his attempts to take their conflicted humanity more seriously. Batman v. Superman may be the most lavishly misbegotten big-budget superhero movie ever made; it’s also one of the only such movies in the past 15 years to indulge more than the merest flash of sexiness, courtesy of a tub scene between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.

Other DCEU filmmakers make this tension feel less directly hostile. Aquaman accumulates power as it becomes clearer that James Wan would rather be making a horror-tinged underwater fantasy set in a world beyond terrestrial DC continuity, rather than bracing himself on the character’s relatively minimal angst. Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey ricochets around Gotham City sans Batman, thrillingly uncertain of (or maybe just unconcerned about) whether it’s supposed to be a double-backed Guy Ritchie-style crime comedy, a girl-power action movie, or a spoof of superhero piety. This isn’t the usual Marvel PR spin about how this or that superhero film is really a ’70s conspiracy thriller, or a ’90s rom-com, or Beverly Hills Cop meets The 400 Blows; Yan’s movie seems to be constantly searching for an escape hatch, with a Harley Quinn-like glee.

Harley is less well-served by the first Suicide Squad, which never reconciles director David Ayer’s cop-movie posturing, the characters’ circus-freak mischief, and the zombified Hot Topic where it feels like much of the movie takes place. Even that movie, though, has its ragged charms, and gives way to Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, an in-continuity redo that better understands the thin line between venerated demigod hero and written-off misfit. It gains some extra power from the fact that Gunn made it at least in part for spite, during the brief period after he’d been fired by Marvel (albeit temporarily) as the director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The DCEU thrived on these unexpected zigzags that dodge the futile attempts to make something more universally palatable. If you didn’t like one DC movie, it was entirely possible you’d have a good time at another; the connections between them became looser, more frayed, more playful—or, as with The Batman and Joker, nonexistent.

Maybe this is why they never had much luck with the kind of traditional franchise-building and org-charting that would project an image of prosperity and order. Any semblance of overarching storyline came to a splattering halt with Justice League (best enjoyed, if at all, as a brisk Saturday morning cartoon with some inexplicable graverobbing), and even their attempts to make direct sequels to their biggest successes haven’t really paid off. Wonder Woman, the closest the DCEU films have come to superhero classicism, also feels most firmly resolved about its hero’s ability to make a difference, as director Patty Jenkins eventually shares (and therefore perfectly sells) the awe around Diana’s spectacular combination of physical prowess and innocent idealism. This resolution carries over to Wonder Woman 1984—meaning the character suddenly has less urgency, reverting to a distended version of the Marvel question about the best way to do good, with a heavy dose of Richard Donner-era Superman thrown in (for better and worse). As a result, Diana (and, for that matter, Jenkins) is no longer the fish out of water that made the first movie so immediately charming. Speaking of fish, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is currently underwhelming at the box office, partially due to superhero fatigue, but maybe also because its creature-feature goofiness can’t surprise fans a second time. It’s more of the same—which until recently the DC movies have often seemed too nervous to provide, with filmmakers too restless to insist.

Even WW84 and Lost Kingdom, though, have their loopy convictions (wishing rocks! Octopus spies!), not least because they feel driven by the whims of stars who may have let their big-ticket roles go to their heads. The MCU has the more stacked roster, to be sure, filling out even minor roles with a mix of legends and up-and-comers across dozens of films. So it’s notable that the DCEU minted genuine star performances from performers who seem unlikely to flourish as readily in other franchises; Wonder Woman and Aquaman are likely the roles Gadot and Momoa will be best-identified with in perpetuity, and it’s hard to imagine Zachary Levi finding a better live-action outlet for his whole deal than the Tom-Hanks-in-Big-style superhero he played in Shazam. Even the mega-talented Margot Robbie probably won’t find a more delightful and multifaceted comic book heroine than Harley Quinn, and hopefully won’t try. (Good luck to Lady Gaga, who’ll take on an alternate version of the character in October’s Joker: Folie a Deux.) It’s difficult to say the same for Paul Rudd, or Mark Ruffalo, or Benedict Cumberbatch, or Brie Larson—all good in their MCU roles, and never in danger of giving their best-ever performances. There’s no will-this-actually-work mystery in casting Paul Rudd as a third-tier superhero; even if the movie doesn’t work (and Ant-Man 3 certainly doesn’t), you know Rudd will skate.

This, too, explains why Black Adam felt like such a particularly junky outlier in the grand scheme of DC movies: It felt too perfectly engineered for superstar Dwayne Johnson, too transparent in its star’s designs on franchise-branching, too tidy in its antihero’s turn to the light. At their best – and Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Suicide Squad, and Birds of Prey can easily stand with the better MCU pictures—the DCEU movies have made their reluctant-hero shtick both touchingly human and visually splashy, true to spirit of megaproductions that truly don’t seem to know whether they deserve to please a big crowd.

They’re also true to the modern comic book experience: Any reader of superhero comics knows that going 15 years without some kind of reboot, as the Marvel heroes have managed on the big screen, is almost unnatural. The DCEU, by contrast, managed to fit its false starts, double-backs, and creative overhauls under a single umbrella—for ten years, anyway, until the messiness became too much for impatient executives (and, yes, probably also audiences) to tolerate. I’m not saying that the DCEU was too beautiful for this world; these are still superhero movies executed as part of a plan to leverage intellectual property for the global market. That’s true, too, of Joker and The Batman (which also has a sequel in the pipeline), films which in spite of their similarly comic-book-y origins—the company has taken to calling them “Elseworlds,” after a long-running comics conceit—sometimes appeared to be DC’s way of sequestering more ambitious material lest it interfere with the DCEU’s ability to compete with Marvel.

If the DCEU itself never fully invested in the auteur-driven model of superhero-film production it sometimes flirted with—even Snyder, its most immediately distinctive filmmaker, is often more of a brand than an artist—some of the movies did show signs of colorful resistance. The dorky soul of the superhero comes from a sense of not quite belonging, and hoping the reasons you don’t belong can also, ultimately, make you special. The DCEU’s trophy case of second-place ribbons and participation trophies may not have been good for long-term growth and viability and all that stock-market stuff, but it kept these lumbering superheroes humble—and sometimes unpredictable.

Originally Appeared on GQ