Batman v. Superman v. Arrow?

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

Make no mistake, this is not a news item. It is pure speculation. I just thought that title sounded snappy.

I was thinking about the strange divide between DC's efforts to cinematize their comics. It seems to me that people are a lot more on board right now with DC's tv franchise than with the films. Now I am not entirely up to date with who owns what parts of DC, and I don't know if it's a case like Marvel wherein Marvel studios own some characters and properties, and Sony happens to own the rest. But I don't think that is the case.

So, what I really don't understand is why DC is going whole-hog on their lukewarm movie franchise when Arrow and The Flash are doing so well on television. Which got me to thinking that maybe they don't have to divide their universe in such a way. We all know that any comic continuity as old and massive as DC has had several timeline reboots and alternate-universe stories. So, might Time Warner at some point try to justify having two continuities running concurrently with a multiverse-crossover storyline?

Again, idle speculation rather than news, or even suggestion. But it seems to me that comic book nerds may like the idea of reconciliation between the timelines.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Marvel studios own some characters and properties, and Sony happens to own the rest.

Sony owns Spider-Man, Fox owns X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool, Universal owns Namor ("Marvel's Aquaman") and Lionsgate owns something called Man-Thing. This is because Marvel sold their movie rights in the 90s, probably because they needed the cash and decided to take advantage of the fact that Batman had re-kindled interest in the superhero genre.

About the multiverse thing, I don't know. I hate that card. I think Fox played it well with X-Men though, using Days of Future Past as a soft reboot that worked both for the franchise as well as within the confines of its own story.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Multi-universe crossover storyline wouldn't work because the audience for a movie like that would have to both be interested in ALL of the TV shows and the DC cinematic universe.

Some people are only going to watch the shows (and possibly not even all of the shows), some people are only going to watch the movies, and some people are going to do both. If you had a crossover between the movies and the shows then your audience for that would basically only be people who watch both the movies and the shows, otherwise the people who only watch the shows wouldn't know what the hell is going on in the movie universe and vice versa.

Now I could very well be wrong (people didn't think a cohesive multi-property cinematic universe would work until Marvel did it after all), but it doesn't seem to me like it's as likely to pay out. The commitment involved in watching multiple TV shows every week to stay caught up in the TV universe is much higher than watching a movie once every few months, so they'd be banking an awful lot on the TV universe being able to draw a crowd.

That's one of the reasons that the Marvel cinematic universe doesn't really involve much of what's going on in the Agents of Shield TV shows. There's a couple of minor references that are easy to miss, but overall Agents of Shield barely exists in the movie universe so people who don't watch it don't have to know anything about it to enjoy the movies.

Edit:

Then there's the issue of foreign markets. Superhero movies make a ton of money in places like China, and I'm not sure whether the TV shows are even available there. Do they have Agents of Shield or Arrow in China? How do people outside the US watch the shows? Do they have to stream them, or get DVDs? If the shows aren't readily available and popular outside the US they'll never be incorporated into the movie universes in any significant way.

 

[DefunctTheory]

The divide between cinema and TV is already fully in place, and they've already said that if Green Arrow or Flash show up in the movies (Flash, at the very least, will most likely show up sometime), they will be recast and the show will be considered a different canon.

I do understand why they did this - its very hard to maintain a stable narrative when you have dozens of fingers in the pie. Marvel gets away with it because they only have one show, and the people in it are kept at the mercy of the movies - they react to the MCU, but they play at the kids table so the MCU doesn't have to react to them.

You can't have that relationship with the Flash, a man who pisses in the face of physics and has been known to curb stomp physical gods and time itself.

 

[Queen Michael]

Marvel studios own some characters and properties, and Sony happens to own the rest.

Sony owns Spider-Man, Fox owns X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool, Universal owns Namor ("Marvel's Aquaman") and Lionsgate owns something called Man-Thing.

Heh heh... You said "Man-Thing."

On-topic, yeah. It's like the song goes. "While Spider-Man's at Sony and the X-Men are at Fox... And they won't let them go as long as they keep up their stocks..."

 

[laggyteabag]

I dunno, it just seems to me that DC are allergic to creating some sort of continuity between their projects. I understand that Gotham isn't going to do a crossover with Arrow or The Flash due to time period differences, but for a lot of people Grant Gustin is the live action Flash, and Stephen Amell is the live action Green Arrow. To recast the Flash and ignore the Green Arrow entirely just seems to be wasting potential. For all we know, Ezra Miller could make a great Flash, and I wish him success, but we already have a Flash, and to ignore that possibility of a crossover just seems a little odd to me, especially after the success that Marvel are enjoying because of it. Of course you could say that the TV DC universe and the DC film universes are separate, and that is fine (if not a little confusing for those who will watch both), but it just seems like they are passing up a great opportunity to make a great live-action franchise.