Last year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice tried a bit too hard to peddle the shared universe vibe and to set up this November's Justice League. Apparently, upcoming DC movies won't make that mistake again.
During a new interview with Vulture, DC Films co-chairman Geoff Johns and DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson elucidated Warner Brothers' revised strategy for the continuity of their DC Comics-based cinematic universe. While the studio won’t ditch the concept of continuity, they also won't allow it to get in the way of the storytelling. According to Nelson:
Our intention, certainly, moving forward, is using the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn't make sense, but there's no insistence upon an overall story line or inter-connectivity in that universe.
The studio is already enjoying the sweet taste of success with this brand new strategy, thanks to Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman. They’re looking at the summer blockbuster as an example as they move forward with the DC movies. According to Johns:
[Wonder Woman is] not about another movie. Some of the movies do connect the characters together, like Justice League. But, like with Aquaman, our goal is not to connect Aquaman to every movie.
If you look closely, this is exactly what Matt Reeves meant when he made the controversial comment about The Batman being a standalone movie that’s "not part of the extended universe" (which he later clarified too). Diane Nelson added:
Moving forward, you'll see the DC movie universe being a universe, but one that comes from the heart of the filmmaker who's creating them.
Geoff Johns and Diane Nelson (Photo Credit – Warner Bros.)
Beyond Aquaman, we've heard that as many as 17 projects are in the works, but Warner Bros. announced just eight of them during this year's San Diego Comic-Con International. They haven't set a release date for any of them besides Wonder Woman 2.
Critics say that the studio doesn't appear to have a concrete plan for the so-called DC Extended Universe. When such allegations came up, Geoff Johns' sunny disposition faded away as he asserted:
Some of the stuff is true, some of it isn't true. When we talk about things or we're making deals for people to develop scripts or whatever, sometimes things leak. Sometimes things are misreported, and it's frustrating. Because we do wanna go out there and talk about what our strategy is, and this stuff just muddies the water. There's a lot of internal conversations going on about, How do we help kind of clean that up a bit?
