While DC has taken longer to get their cinematic world up and running than their competition over at Marvel Studios, the ball has finally begun to get rolling. With Wonder Woman currently filming, many eyes are now focused on the big chapter that will follow that movie, Justice League: Part One. It will be the big coming out party for many of DC’s heroes who have not had their time in the sun yet. It appears that this is part of the reason that Justice League is not an easy movie to make: there’s just a lot of world building that needs to be done with the film.
This is not the first time that a Justice League movie has been planned by Warner Bros. It is, however, the closest that such a film has come to actually getting off the ground. Director Zack Snyder, the man behind Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, tells Entertainment Weekly that while the studio has been getting impatient about making Justice League happen, he believes it needs to be handled with care. Said the filmmaker,
It was a little bit of an ‘about time’ moment, and I don’t blame [the studio] for feeling that way, because it’s a long time coming. But I do feel like it’s a little bit of a creative hurdle. It seems like an easy thing to do at first glance, the idea that, ‘Oh, we just get the rest of the superheroes in there.’ But you have to [establish] a world where they can exist.
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave each of the Avengers their own movie before creating the team-up event, only Superman and Wonder Woman will have received their own solo film prior to the release of Justice League: Part One, and only Batman is expected to have any significant screen time beyond that. This means that DC and Warner Bros. have to create a world in which characters like The Flash and Aquaman make sense, without necessarily spending a lot of time on them. Both characters are expected to have cameos, or, at least, be referenced, in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice but that’s all we’ll likely see of them before the big event film in 2017.
As Zack Snyder says, making a Justice League movie may seemsimple enough at first, but it may not truly be so. If the audience buys an alien from the planet Krypton and an Amazon goddess, why wouldn’t they accept a lord of the oceans or an intergalactic police officer who wears a lot of green? Since these characters will not have much development on their own, however they are introduced will need to feel organic to the overall story. It’s not necessarily a question of suspension of disbelief, but more that they will feel like complete characters, and not simply as tacked on to the ones that we know well. The better the world is developed, the more the new characters will feel like part of it.
What do you see as the potential opportunities, or pitfalls, of Justice League: Part One? Is there anything they need to do in order to make it work? Hit the comments section below with your thoughts.
