Lack of Planning in the DCEU
By George Robbins
It is of absolutely no surprise to anyone at this point that studio interference is what caused issues for the DCEU thus far, at least for one movie. Though there is no telling whether they got too involved in other films as well, they have been known to get too involved in the ‘Suicide Squad‘ movie. This has been something that was speculated from the time the movie was first released, but has only been revealed recently amidst director David Ayer’s attempts to have a director’s cut released. The studio had decided that they wanted to make the movie more of a comedy before it was released so they scheduled reshoots and it is apparently the reason why the film ended up with such an all-over-the-place plot and tone.
Ayer has said that the original plot of the film actually was much more coherent and a lot of the characters had better stories, but the studio felt otherwise. This resulted in a film that many DC fans were excited for getting thrown to the wayside. Many people ended up disliking the film and it received generally poor reviews that meant that it would just end up being one of those films most people are disappointed to see. This failing is one that Ayer does not want to let go, since he put so much time into the original cut of the movie and he wants his version of the film to get its own release. It is up to the studio whether the version he wants out there will get released, but it should be more of a duty to them at this point to release it.
The fact that they suddenly decided to do reshoots to begin with just shows how little they care about the direction of the cinematic universe they are working on. They tried to play off of how well the ‘Deadpool‘ movie did by trying to make their anti-heroes more comedic to draw in audiences which doesn’t fit in with most of the characters to begin with. This ultimately ruined the movie and showed the audience that they are doing whatever they can to try and draw audiences in by appealing to familiarity. Instead of just trying their own thing and building a universe off of that, they are trying to copy other established universes and it shows.
Fans have been constantly disappointed by the DCEU due to the fact they are trying to make it seem like the universe is already established, even though people know it isn’t. Without building a proper universe, it is hard for any of the movies to seem like they were planned very well. No movie did a better job at showing how poorly planned it all is than ‘Suicide Squad.’ Hopefully, moving forward, they will start formulating a proper plan to keep people interested and to make sure that thee universe isn’t all over the place. There is no telling where the DCEU will go moving forward, but maybe it will be able to have some sort of coherent storyline for people to start following.