The future of the DCEU: More villain movies, J.J. Abrams, and R Ratings

Everyone knows that the DC Extended Universe got off to a bit of a rough start. Batman v Superman was panned. Justice League was a box office disaster. Ben Affleck quit playing the role of Bruce Wayne, etc. Things were looking dire for a while, but Warner Bros. managed to turn it around with a two-pronged strategy: A) Release movies like Shazam! and Aquaman that took themselves a little less seriously, and; B) Make Joker, which earned a stupid amount of money.

Basically, it looks like the DC movies have finally settled into a groove. But what comes next? Variety dug into that question, overturning some rocks and uncovering some intriguing stuff underneath.

Apparently, the studio is most confident about Batman. There’s already a new movie in the pipes — The Batman — with Robert Pattison stepping in as the Caped Crusader. Also on board are a cadre of villains, including Paul Dano as the Riddler, Zöe Kravitz as Catwoman, and Colin Farrell as The Penguin. Obviously buoyed by the success of Joker, Warner Bros. and DC are contemplating giving some of those characters their own movies, provided The Batman does well at the box office.

Also possibly on tap for potential solo outings are characters to be introduced in the upcoming Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). That includes the likes of Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). As with Marvel, there’s no shortage of DC characters on which to base movies.

And after a period of trying to ape the Marvel model of big crossover events like Avengers: Endgame, Warner Bros. is now embracing more discreet standalone movies. Unlike the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, Warner Bros. has no compunction about making some of those films R-rated, another way it can stand out. According to the Variety report, both Birds of Prey and James Gunn’s upcoming The Suicide Squad will be rated R.

So it sounds like Warner Bros. has that side of the DCEU put together. But what about Superman, possibly the most famous superhero in the world? Henry Cavill left the role after filming Justice League, and a lot of people assumed that he, like Ben Affleck, was out. But recently he’s been saying that it might not be done playing the Big Blue Boy Scout. There’s also the matter of him now being managed by Dany Garcia, a key figure in the Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson’s Seven Bucks production company. The Rock, if you’ll come down the rabbit hole with me, is going to appear as Black Adam in his own DCEU movie. Might the two appear together?

Collider asked Hiram Garcia, another Seven Bucks figure and Dany’s brother, about it at a press event. “I think the DC Universe is a wonderful universe and we’re open to everything,” he said. “We have big aspirations for it. We’re friends with Henry. [Dwayne Johnson] and Henry are friends, it’s a huge comic book brand as well. And I always just loved the idea. Who knows? But man, Black Adam for Superman is really cool. That’d be really powerful.”

Keep an eye on that one.

All that said, Variety reports that Warner Bros. has also heard a pitch for actor Michael B. Jordan about a Superman movie, although it looks like that one’s not going forward, at least not for the moment. There have also been “discussions with J.J. Abrams” about him rebooting the Superman franchise. All in all, Superman’s future on the big screen seems much less settled than Batman’s.

But like we said, DC has a lot of characters. Warner Bros. is also keen to get a Green Lantern movie into production, and may offer Abrams a chance to direct that one as well. And remember: there’s also an original Green Lantern TV series coming to HBO Max, which opens up a whole other avenue for WarnerMedia to go down.

So we don’t know everything yet, but at the least, we can say that the Dc Extended Universe is no longer a complete floundering mess.

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