NO CONFIDENCE - Warner Bros. Won't Let Superman Go It Alone For Next Outing

Well, it's happened.

Our present has fulfilled a prophecy made in the past by a Will Smith movie that depicted the future.

If you never saw Smith's 'I Am Legend', or even if you did, chances are you missed the shot of a squalid, overrun Times Square in the zombie apocalypse time of 'fore showing a movie marquee with the iconic Superman 'S' layered over the equally iconic Bat of the Dark Knight. This background gag was good harmless fun at the time; a lark for the fanboys and fangirls who recognized the overlapping sigils for what they were and required no further explanation. The filmmakers, it seemed, were geeks like the rest of us, or at least that's what they were trying to tell us in the midst of a film that was mercilessly curb-stomping one of the most revered works of speculative horror ever penned.

SEE?! - 'I Am Legend' (2007)

NO, REALLY, SEE?! - SD Comic Con

Now that throwaway joke has been realized here and now in the form of Warner Bros.'s announcement at the San Diego Comic Con that the next 'Man of Steel' will be a buddy picture with the Batman. Now, we comic aficionados are easily as suspicious as sailors, and we might begin to wonder if it wasn't an omen of Galactus-size proportions that the first titillation of a real-life 'World's Finest' appeared in a movie about the end of the globe as we know it.

Alas, I'm too old to still be a simple reactionary, flying off the handle and portending Ragnarok simply because I know the premise of the next 'Superman', and it's tedious to go on for a few pages about a movie whose title isn't even known. Besides, if I start using my A-material now I'll run out of original gripes before I actually see this new film and have to review it in earnest. No, this piece is just a meditation on my gut reaction, and even that can't be said to be wholly unique; already I've read many sources who think exactly as I do. I don't need to restate what they have already said, but in my reverie it might happen anyway.

Who am I kidding, of COURSE it will.

Seriously, the bricks and mortar of my feelings on the SDCC announcement can actually be found in my previous posts, first about 'Man of Steel' and then about Hollywood's addiction to hash...re-hash. In a microdot: I wasn't impressed with Snyder's take on Superman, the studios have hitched their wagons to superhero flicks as if they were a flock of golden geese, and anything proven to work once can, according to the physics of their boardroom Q-universe, be rebooted again and again for future exploitation anyway, so critics be damned and pass me the moneybag.

But is it really that simple? On the surface the decree from Warner at the Comic Con seemed like a teen dream given form: a team-up picture featuring the two most recognizable superheroes of all time, soon to be emblazoned on the big screen by handlers of respectable pedigree and a nine-digit budget to burn. The announcement was made in a carnival atmosphere and blew away just about all the other news to come out of the event, bar none. But this strategy – for it is a strategy, and as shrewd as any you're likely to see this side of a RISK board – may be more telling than it seemed on the surface. Anyway it certainly gives pause to those of us with a jaundiced eye toward the studio system and not just a little pessimism about the minds of the bean counters by whose word these movies live or die.

The theory, then: 'Man of Steel' did well, but it didn't do well enough – not with the critics, not with audiences, and not with the audience's dead presidents, who failed to fill Warner's coffers as high as Warner wanted. Ol' Supes is going to need some help. And he 's gonna look...kinda like a giant bat.

Maybe after six films the studio heads have finally realized the old stories have a ring of truth to them: Superman is not a sure thing at the box office. If the Sacred Reboot failed to tickle the $1 billion mark, what hope can there be for a stand-alone sequel? Or two? For while Kal-El's newest adventure can rightly be called it a hit, it has NOT, to date, been the mega-hit so many assumed it would be. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com 'Man of Steel' had collected just over $285 million as of July 22^nd. The shooting budget for the film was $225 million. Now, in 21^st America, $60 million in pure profit isn't even enough to keep the lights on at night. Warner has to look overseas, where 'MOS' added another $350 million to the booty total, but only after experiencing a precipitous sales drop from the peak of opening weekend. North of $600 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it ain't Avatar money, or Avengers money. Hell, it ain't even Iron Man 3 money. This must be cause for confusion, as Superman could probably kick the crap out of Iron Man, the other Avengers, and the Na'vi without even losing any bars in the process.

The suits are awful people, but they know their numbers and their Marketing 101, and while they may not listen to a single good idea before or during the movie-making process, they clearly aren't deaf to the potential lessons of a subpar aftermath. At best the situation is that the Snyder/Goyer/Nolan effort was 'off' in some way, a way that made it fail to connect with audiences, generate good word-of-mouth, and encourage repeat business. At worst – and not exclusive to my last sentence – is the very real possibility that Superman just can't cut it on his own. Maybe he's too dull. Maybe his squeaky-clean view of the world no longer gels with our post-9/11 planet. Or maybe the very reckoning I predicted in my 'Reboots and Remakes' post a little bit back came true far sooner than I thought; maybe audiences balked at the idea of the Man of Tomorrow being subjected to Goyer's dial-a-script approach to capes and masks.

Does it matter? Sadly, it does not. In a fair world, a world Superman would actually like, he'd be given another chance to stand on his own red-booted feet and try for another grand slam. But that is a luxury Warner Bros. apparently can't afford. So they're turning to the closest thing they have to a sure thing: the Dark Knight Detective, a man with no superpowers who nonetheless did something Superman couldn't: make them all a little bit richer than they might have been otherwise.

This could all be bullshit, and I and the others out there who think this is a sound theory may be miles off base. I'm going to stand by it simply because we're unlikely to get full disclosure from the studio anytime soon. I'm more concerned with what this will do to my good friend, the Batman. If this 'World's Finest' flick is indeed going to serve as a springboard to a new Bat trilogy, as it certainly will, then we'll be looking at no fewer than four new features starring Gotham's winged defender inside of ten years. This, of course, is hot on the heels of the Nolan years (2004-2012), and as thorough and exhaustive an exploration of the Batman mythos as ever will likely make it to the big screen. And not to pluck the same string yet again, but it's good odds if not near-certain that David Goyer will be writing ALL of them.

This has me very worried. This kind of inbreeding and cronyism brought down the Dutch kings, after all. How many bastard children must Goyer sire before the three-act gene pool hits rock bottom? And what will become of the source material the powers-that-be are supposedly mining for 'inspiration'? 'Batman Begins' was a solid effort, but the bits and pieces culled from 'Batman: Year One' were so watered down they lost all significance – no Gordon parallel narrative, no pandemic of police corruption, no fistfight with the S.W.A.T – was what Goyer did to Miller's extraordinary work really much more than pulling ammo off a dying soldier so others could keep up the fight?

The announcement at SDCC did it one better: a dramatic 'reading' of from Book Four of no less a holy tome than 'The Dark Knight Returns', the 'I want you to remember...' speech from Batman as he finishes trouncing Superman. I found it insulting. They are NOT – by Snyder's own admission – adapting TDKR into a film, and while it is an absolute given that Wayne and Kent will exchange blows before teaming up, they most certainly will not be battling in anything even remotely close to the context in which Batman delivered those inviolable lines. For God's sake, they can't even show blood in a PG-13 movie, and yet they had the arrogance to quote Miller directly as if they were even capable of doing justice to that history-changing fight, to say nothing of the sheer narrative weight of TDKR as whole. Every fanboy and fangirl should think back to that blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in 'I Am Legend' and feel their back go up, if only a little bit.

Time will tell. Encouragingly, there have been several articles from major media sources lately about the dearth of hero flicks and the specter of audience fatigue. I'm reminded of the way animals always know to flee the area before an earthquake hits. In the meantime I refuse to feel sorry for Warner Bros. and their plight. They will be one giant among many in the box office breadline of 2015, and they will have the Return of Joss Whedon and the Galaxy Far, Far Away with which to contend, among others. But that, my friends, is a story for another time.