MULTIVERSE MADNESS The Multiple Screen Worlds of DC
The new film and TV adaptations of DC Comics properties are doing away with decades-old restrictions.
On February 26, it was announced that Warner Bros. is working on a new Superman film, to be written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and produced by J.J. Abrams, with the idea of potentially introducing a new screen incarnation of the Man of Steel. That last detail didn’t go down well with fans of Henry Cavill, who has frequently expressed interest in reprising the role at least one more time. And while the politics behind the studio’s announcement may not be entirely noble (this comes at a time when the higher-ups at Warner in general and the DC Films department in particular have been openly accused of racist behavior by actor Ray Fisher), the announcement itself is important for its connection to a major shift in how the DC characters are treated on the screen.
The idea is that this new version of Superman will exist in the same audiovisual landscape as what remains of the so-called DC Extended Universe, as well as the current CW incarnation of the last son of Krypton. Such a scenario would have been unthinkable even just five years ago, and that’s because of a now defunct unwritten rule that there was to be no character overlap between the film and TV universes.
This rule was first implemented 20 years ago, when Warner Bros. put a stop to plans for a TV series called Bruce Wayne (the pilot script is available online), which was supposed to tell the story of how the titular character became Batman, over the course of five or six seasons. Because the film division was already working on a Batman origin story, which eventually became Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the idea was repurposed for a show about a young Clark Kent. That became Smallville, which inherited its predecessor’s philosophy of eschewing traditional superhero stuff: series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar famously had a rule called “no tights, no flights”, which remained in place until the final episode. This also allowed the show to air while Superman films were in active development, since Tom Welling was technically playing the pre-Superman incarnation.
Over the course of the show’s ten seasons, Warner’s policy about not using characters on the small screen if they had film projects in development was implemented on a regular basis: the showrunners were repeatedly denied the possibility of having Clark interact with Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen (although Barry’s grandson Bart, aka Impulse, was allowed to appear from time to time). This also applied to one-off villains: a season 7 episode where Clark squares off with an immortal adversary (played by former TV Superman Dean Cain) had to be hastily rewritten when Warner Bros. vetoed the use of the name Vandal Savage, due to New Line Cinema having plans for the character at the time. He was renamed Curtis Knox, which became an inside joke years later, in an episode of Legends of Tomorrow where Savage uses that moniker as an alias.
Similar rules popped up during the production of Arrow as well, and that proved to be a bit of a headache at times: since the show quite blatantly borrowed from Nolan’s Batman films in terms of tone and, to some degree, plot developments, several villains featured in the series were actually cribbed from the Caped Crusader’s universe – most notably Deathstroke, Ra’s al Ghul and members of the Suicide Squad. Because they were not typically associated with Green Arrow, the producers had to get permission from DC and the film division each time, sometimes with odd consequences: the Suicide Squad characters were gradually written out because of the 2016 movie version (Amanda Waller had previously suffered a similar fate on Smallville, being denied a return appearance because of the Green Lantern film), and Deathstroke was temporarily retired when Ben Affleck intended to use him as the main villain in a standalone Batman movie that never came to be (it’s since been retooled as a non-DCEU movie about a younger Bruce Wayne in the early stages of his crimefighting career).
Basically, while Marvel had to be creative due to a lack of access to certain characters, who were stuck in pre-existing deals with other studios, DC had the whole roster at its disposal but decided to keep the film and TV units separate anyway (this also happened in animation: between 2004 and 2006, the Justice League series – rebranded as Justice League Unlimited – was barred from using any Batman characters apart from Batman himself, and writer/producer Bruce Timm has stated in interviews that in the early stages of development there was a brief period during which they were told Wonder Woman was off-limits). It got to a point where some fans have openly speculated the repeated delays of the Flash film, currently scheduled for November 2022, were a stalling tactic so the movie would be out after the CW series starring Grant Gustin was off the air (at the time of writing, the show has been renewed for an eighth season; the film would overlap with the ninth, should it be confirmed).
All of that has changed in the past couple of years: 2022 will feature at least three big-screen versions of Batman, with Robert Pattinson playing a younger Bruce Wayne in a standalone project while Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton are appearing in The Flash, courtesy of Multiverse shenanigans. And while Henry Cavill’s future as Superman remains uncertain, whoever dons the cape next will most likely co-exist with the Tyler Hoechlin version, currently starring in his own series after previously making a handful of appearances that were scheduled based on Cavill’s status (his Superman was either officially dead or, starting in late 2017, not actively expected to return).
The studio has finally realized that, much like with the comics, there are infinite earths to explore (some films are even generating serialized spin-offs on HBO Max). As for whether said explorations will prove fruitful, well, that’s what we’re bound to find out soon enough.