When all is said and done about Super Bowl LI, there were two major opportunities that ultimately became the greatest flubs of the night: the Atlanta Falcons failed to stick the landing in the second half, and Warner Bros. didn't provide us with any Super Bowl spots for their upcoming roster of films. This may not sound like much on the surface level, until you realize that this includes an absence of DC Comics TV spots.
Considering the problems that have plagued their roster for The Batman as of late, not to mention the cloud or rumors that hang over Wonder Woman's almost completed form, you would think the studio would want to reassure fans that everything's ok, and that the four panel fun awaiting them would be better than what the DC Universe has provided to date. Sadly, those cries fell upon deaf ears, and the studio made a huge mistake in letting this happen.
While our hopes for a Justice League tease may have been seen as a bit unrealistic, we were at least expecting Wonder Woman to make an appearance, considering the film is on the track for completion well before its June 2nd release date. Our hopes were raised ever so slightly when we remembered that Transformers: The Last Knight had a June 23rd release date, and it screened a commercial, so surely it shouldn't have been a big ask for DC's Amazonian warrior to give us 30 seconds of fresh footage, with the possibility for an extended look online, right?
Apparently, it was not only too much for us to expect DC and Warner Bros. to give us a look at what they're bringing us, but Warner Bros. didn't run a spot for one single film that's releasing from their slate this year. To give you an idea of why this is such a big deal, take a look at the heavy hitters on their roster of 14 movies dropping between this weekend and the rest of this year:
The LEGO Batman MovieKong: Skull IslandCHiPsKing Arthur: Legend Of The SwordWonder WomanDunkirkBlade Runner 2049Justice League
Out of those films, there's three DC titles that could have been plugged, and one of them that could have been a solid touchdown for next weekend's box office market. And yet, out of all of those films that could have so easily been pushed onto the eager masses, none of those films were showcased for a moment of last night's collective ad space. This is extremely strange, considering how brazen DC and Warner Bros were with selling their DC Cinematic Universe around this same point last year.
It's hard to think that Warner Bros and DC aren't at the very least marginally worried, and at the most in full blown panic mode, as history has shown us that the studio wasn't always shy about showing us what they had cooking in the past. By this point in 2016, we had a full prime time special that pimped not only Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, but also a new trailer for the then-forthcoming Suicide Squad, and the rest of the developing DC canon being groomed for film. What a difference a year makes.
It's not that we don't want to like Warner Bros' DC Universe films, or that we want them to fail. Quite the contrary: we're among the fans that want Marvel and DC to compete with increasingly better films, giving us all of the fan-worthy moments we loved on the page in full color life on the screen. But the way that the studio is handling their properties, from the production right down to last night's Super Bowl snub, has us upset about the prospects for even the greatest sounding prospects in the studio's comic canon.
A lack of new footage this late in the game, considering all of the stuff DC saw fit to give us last year, is not only a missed opportunity, it's a vote of no confidence in their own work. Let's hope we're wrong, and that Warner Bros. has some DC Comics magic up their sleeves. We'll find out when Wonder Woman hits theaters on June 2nd, or when Justice League arrives on November 10th. At the very least, we have The LEGO Batman to look forward to, which debuts this Thursday in early screenings.
