Segarini VS Batman V Superman Part 3 – The Post-Prelude Prelude to the Actual Review Part One

I remember reading this: ” Due to his success with the Batman franchise Christopher Nolan was brought on to help develop the reboot of Superman along with screenwriter David S. Goyer. This was merely as a creative consultant, it was never intended for Nolan to direct. When Zack Snyder was later brought on as director, Nolan chose to hand all creative control over to Snyder and focus on The Dark Knight Rises (2012). According to Nolan’s wife/producer Emma Thomas, “They [Nolan and Goyer] brought it to an appropriate screenplay and it’s now Snyder’s picture.” and thinking to myself, There goes Man of Steel….

To be fair, Man of Steel did a lot right, but most of it is in the details, the secondary cast, and a huge whack of nods to DC Comics writers and artists. There was a great amount of dialogue, backstory, and visible signs and locations culled from not only the comics, but from the television series Smallville. There is a list at IMdB that will at least prove Snyder and the producers and art department did their homework. Check it out here…it is actually quite informative and entertaining. Unfortunately,  all of this research and deep knowledge of the source material was buried alive under a mountain of stupid decisions and painfully misguided adherence to Warner Brothers insisting that the Superman reboot follow the (in their eyes) successful Batman films down the path of silly neo-realism and dour storytelling, bathed in washed-out colour and needless drama. The only time someone smiled in the movie was never.

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Hollywood appears to have either blinders on when confronted with new ideas, or a fetish for doing the same thing over and over again. Couple that with the “follow the money” ethic which guides the sadly creatively bereft majority of Tinsel Town’s movers and Groovers to immediately try to copy the success of box office winners by emulating what they think is the reason the movie made so much moolah, and you couldn’t come up with a better equation for Lazy Exec Keeps Job By Riding Coattails of Audience Pleasing Movie More Than Likely Made By Accident. It is the same ditzy thought process that has strangled the record industry and produced so much sameness and brain-dead music…and “artists”.

When an original, risk taking effort DOES get made, the bandwagon  gets jumped by every sycophantic, trophy wife owner in Holmby Hills green-lights whatever project he turned down 10 times that comes closest to being shaped into a film similar to the one everyone is tweeting about.

You would think by now that really rich, experienced executives who make money on the avails of the creative talent of writers, actors, directors, etc, (who they throw money at to make them more money), would find the best people for the job, shut the fuck up, and either go play golf or cheat on their wives…but no.

They can’t leave anything alone. They hedge their bets, they convince themselves they are creative, and (worst of all) they see a winner and more often than not, don’t hire the people responsible…they hire other people and tell them to do what the winners did.

Too bad they don’t know what that is. HINT: It’s different Every. Single. Time.

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Have a look at this….

Movie Summary	Captain America 2	The Amazing Spider-Man 2	X-Men: Days of Future Past	Guardians of the Galaxy
Genre	Action / Adventure	Action / Adventure	Action / Adventure	Action / Adventure
Studio	Buena Vista	Sony / Columbia	Fox	Buena Vista
Release Date	April 4, 2014	May 2, 2014	May 23, 2014	August 1, 2014
Domestic Gross	$259,766,572	$202,853,933	$233,921,534	$333,176,600
Production Budget	$170 million	n/a	$200 million	$170 million
Running Time	2 hrs. 16 min.	2 hrs. 22 min.	2 hrs. 11 min.	2 hrs. 1 min.
MPAA Rating	PG-13	PG-13	PG-13	PG-13
MPAA Reason	intense sequences of violence, gunplay and action throughout.	sequences of sci-fi action/violence.	sequences of intense sci-fi violence and action, some suggestive material, nudity and language.	intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language.

In 2014, these were the highest grossing Superhero movies. Three sequels featuring proven audience favourites, and a dark horse filly based on characters no one in the general public had ever heard of.

Spiderman…the most iconic character of the lot, is owned by Columbia Pictures, bought from Marvel years ago when Marvel was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and needed a ticket into Hollywood as well.

Captain America was on its first sequel and riding a wave of high expectations, as was the X-Men entry, the latest of multiple sequels which were defying the rules by being better since the first three movies that carried the X-Men brand. Fox was responsible for X-Men, another franchise purchased from the then failing Marvel, and Cap was in the very capable hands of Kevin Feige and Marvel Studio, who were on a roll matched only by Pixar, the first three Star Wars movies, and Steven Spielberg’s early career. The dark horse in the race also belonged to Marvel, who, in an incredibly rare decision, took a gigantic risk by filming and releasing a non-starter by Hollywood standards; a film based on a failed comic book with a fan base of a few writers, comic book collectors, and Mountain Dew swilling nerdlingers covered in candy bar zits, Dorito crumbs, and Axe body wash.

And people like me.

You won’t believe what happened next….

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Batman v Superman was doomed before the cameras starting rolling. Man of Steel had already nailed the creative, entertaining coffin shut, but that didn’t stop Warner Brothers from taking a bad idea and making it worse. To be fair, the whole reason Nolan’s “dark”, “edgy” (if you are an angry 12 year old boy) Batman Trilogy existed, was because of a masterwork of storytelling by an eccentric, slightly mad British author named Alan Moore.

Alan Moore

From the first note of the opening credits (after a brutal fight scene) Watchmen the movie, like the Alan Moore comic of the same name from which it was brilliantly adapted, redefined Superheroes and Superhero movies for all time.

The director and decision maker behind the film?

Zack Snyder.

The man brought on board by Warner Brothers to place Superman in the same financial position as Nolan’s Batman films…

…and to double down on their bet, Warners hired Nolan as a consultant-producer just to make sure their carefully considered plan would succeed.

Silly boys.

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Captain Marvel was bigger than Superman in his heyday, usually selling over a million copies every issue. When sales faltered, DC (owners of Superman) sued the Big Red Cheese out of existence and Fawcett disappeared. That in itself is a story for another day.

The biggest difference (and there were many) was the fact that Capt. Marvel had no problem killing the bad guys. Witness the similar covers below. Supes made sure the occupants were out of the car, Marvel just tossed the car (full of screaming passengers) into a wall.

Fuck ’em.

The Big Blue Boy Scout

The Big Red Cheese

 

The British comic company who carried the Captain changed his name to Marvel Man and carried on, later renaming him again as Miracle Man and changing his backstory and identity with Alan Moore at the helm. Not only did Miracle Man kill his enemies, he did it with glee…sometimes dropping them from great heights, or just popping their heads off their necks. Pretty cool.

But Superman didn’t do those things. Never. In fact, the one time he did, he walked into a room that contained Gold Kryptonite (which removed his Superpowers permanently. The writer of that story? …Alan Moore, who also killed off Lana Lang, Krypto, and Jimmy Olsen in the process.

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow

It was an imaginary story (Moore used to accurately say, “They’re all imaginary stories”) to signify the end of Superman’s Golden Age and Silver Age eras to make way for the Man of Steel Superman, then the New 52. When Coca Cola changed their formula and introduced New Coke, the outcry was so loud and the sales figures so bad, they back tracked and fixed the problem with Classic Coke, which STILL brings in the numbers.

DC continues to pop the head off the neck of the Superman who made Superman famous and well loved in the first place, and keeps digging the hole they’re in deeper and deeper.

Donner’s Superman, having gone too far in the My Little Pony direction with the character, didn’t help either. Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Clark Kent still gives me hives…as bad as Adam West’s Batman…but, oh, how the public loved them…for a little while.

As badly as these characters have been handled in the past, the worst was yet to come….

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NEXT! THE CONCLUSION TO SEGARINI VS BATMAN V SUPERMAN. What’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and how the whole mess could have been avoided. PLUS the actual review of Batman v Superman.

You can blame Canadian Music Week this time.

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Segarini’s regular columns appear here whenever Lois gets pushed off a building.

Contact us at dbawis@rogers.com

Bob “The Iceman” Segarini was in the bands The Family Tree, Roxy, The Wackers, The Dudes, and The Segarini Band and nominated for a Juno for production in 1978. He also hosted “Late Great Movies” on CITY TV, was a producer of Much Music, and an on-air personality on CHUM FM, Q107, SIRIUS Sat/Rad’s Iceberg 95, (now 85), and now publishes, edits, and writes for DBAWIS, continues to write music, make music, and record.