Since I have no interest in seeing it, I'm not the guy to spend a lot of time discussing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I suspect a lot of industry folks and industry observers are wrestling with a dilemma this morning. The movie made a ton o' money over the weekend — more than enough to be considered a smash hit on one level.
Then again, its grosses also plunged over the three days suggesting that bad word of mouth kept people away, as did the mostly-contemptuous reviews. At WonderCon, I heard from some who loved it but there seemed to be a lot of "buzz" that it's not only a bad movie but one that defaces its lead properties. A lot of people didn't exit the theater disappointed so much as angry.
So now you have the question: Is this film a model to be emulated in the future? Or an example of what you shouldn't do if you get to make the next movie of Batman or Superman or any established character with a lot of history? The level of box office drop-off in the coming days may help some answer that. The ancillary income from merchandising that ties-in with the movie may provide additional clues. But right now and maybe for a long time after, heads in Hollywood will be spinning over this conflict.
Big companies which own big properties need to deal with the fact that a great character has his or her breaking point; that you can devalue a precious commodity by letting this producer do one version of it, another writer do that version of it, another director do yet another version of it, etc. The more that is changeable about a character, the less he or she is really about. And the more different interpretations you have out there, the greater the chance that some will damage the affection that audiences have for the character or that the variance will water it down to the point where it's not very special at all.
Is Superman a dark, gritty, maniacal character or is he a sunny, positive force with a personality as grand as his powers? If he can be one in some appearances and the other in others, eventually he becomes not about either. He's just a name and maybe a visual which can be altered a lot.
Characters like that can go from hand to hand. The creator(s) usually has/have the best take…though admittedly there have been creators who didn't seem to know what they'd created or didn't care what you did to them. If you made Batman into a Transvestite Nazi, Bob Kane would have probably praised it as true to his vision if his credit and the amount on his check were both of sufficient size.) Thereafter, the character's value has a lot to do with the sensitivity and skill of those entrusted with him or her. Ideally, you hope they land with someone who can and will say to the right proposals, "No, no…that's not right for this property!"
The problem when a character like Superman or Batman (or Bugs Bunny or Yogi Bear or a thousand others) is controlled by a company the size of Time-Warner is that so many different parties have input or temporary control that some are by the sheer law of numbers, going to be wrong. And at times, there may be no one who can take the long view of the character and say, "No, no…that's not right for this property!" Since Mel Blanc passed, no one at Time-Warner has even settled on one actor to talk for Bugs. Every time a different producer or director is in charge of a Bugs Bunny project, he picks from about eighteen people who do Blanc imitations of varying fidelity. The wabbit no longer speaks with one voice and from appearance to appearance, he varies in other ways as well.
I'm not writing this to say that Superman and Batman are wrong in the new movie. Well, maybe I am but since I haven't seen the film, my opinion there ain't worth even as little as it usually is about anything. Still, when so many people walk out of a movie saying, "That's not my Superman and/or Batman," something is wrong. If even half the moviegoers walked out of a James Bond film saying, "That actor is not James Bond," that actor would probably not be 007 in the next installment in the series…because it's supposed to be a series. There's supposed to be some consistency and continuity and there are certain things about James Bond that make him James Bond.
Just as there are certain things about Superman and Batman that make them Superman and Batman and it's not just the names and an approximation of the visuals. Great characters have great premises and great concepts and there are things about their stories that cause people to fall in love with them. The audiences will put up with a certain amount of variance and interpretation and modernization but if you lose the basic core of Superman and Batman, you've done something wrong.
Those of us who love Superman and Batman are used to seeing versions of him that seem wrong to us. There are Batman lovers who bought his comic book through whole decades when they thought he was in the creative custody of writers, editors and other folks who didn't understand what the Caped Crusader was all about. The same is true of Superman…but it's easy to shrug off a thirty-two page comic book that defaces your favorite hero. There's another issue going on sale next week and someone else is writing that one and eventually, someone comes along who does it right and sales go back up. As one of his editors once said of Superman, "He's indestructible! Even bad stories can't harm him."
A string of bad movies? Maybe. A lot of superstars have found that to be worse than Kryptonite.