Marvel Versus DC On-Screen

I was chattng last night about the current state of movie properties for the two major comic companies. With The Avengers, Marvel's definitely still on a hot streak of movies that are "reasonably good" to "great." The X-Men and Spiderman trilogies started well, but faded as they went on. Still, since about Iron Man, they've all (or nearly so) done really well, especially considering that Iron Man and Thor weren't really (at least in my estimation) flagship characters to the non-comic-reader audience. It's quite impressive. We'll have to see if sequelitis bites Iron Man 3.

In contrast, DC has... well, a Batman trilogy coming to a close. Superman Returns did reasonably well. Green Lantern not so much. And what else have they got? Well... Man of Steel next year perhaps, which is another Superman reboot as far as I know. But it seems to me there aren't a lot more big names in the DC universe to put forth. Wonder Woman? The TV series that was in production last year didn't get released to my knowledge. And she's sort of hard to pitch these days: if you change her up too much, you mess with the appeal of the already-fan audience, but the character exists in sort of a touchy zone with gender issues. Play up the sex appeal and piss people off, try to downplay it and you piss off other people. I have no idea how you manage her character correctly to today's audience, and extra points to anyone that actually manages. Beyond that, who is there? Aquaman? I just don't see a movie of talking to fish. A Justice League in general? Difficult, but maybe possible.

Yet in my ponderings, I also realized the situation is pretty well reversed for animted TV series. In the Marvel column, they had an Iron Man series recently that I never saw. DC, on the other hand, is currently cruising along with a second season of Young Justice (following what seemed a successful run of Justice League) and Green Lantern the Animated Series (I'm not a huge fan of the CG, but have been enjoying watching Razer and Aya develop). And before that, Teen Titans seemed to do well even with a wide range of tone from comedic to very serious episodes.

I wonder if the differences are a matter of deliberate choice as to where to push licensed media or to what degree "chance" plays a role. Certainly there's a larger buy-in for movies rather than TV series and a failure either way can make it harder for the next project...

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