Octopus Overlords

Update: Links to the threads for more specific DC projects, assuming threads have some sort of actual activity in them in the past year or so:

Supergirl
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice


With all the love that Marvel has been getting with their recent announcements, I thought it was time to give DC some love, too. In the past decade we've had Smallville on TV, and a small handful of films (including the Dark Knight trilogy and Watchmen.)

Going forward, however, we currently have Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, and Constantine. Gotham and Constantine are still iffy, but Arrow is well established, the The Flash has been great so far. Supergirl and Static Shock are in the works.

For films?

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice - March 25th, 2016
Suicide Squad – August 5th, 2016
Wonder Woman - June 23rd, 2017
Justice League - November 17th, 2017
The Flash - March 23rd, 2018
Aquaman - July 27th, 2018
Shazam - April 5th, 2019
Justice League 2 - June 14th, 2019
Cyborg - April 3rd, 2020
Green Lantern - June 19th, 2020

As I said, it is a good time to be a DC fan, but the year and a half wait for the films to start showing up is going to be a long one!

Perhaps it is just me but I like Gotham MUCH more than Flash.

Rip wrote:Perhaps it is just me but I like Gotham MUCH more than Flash.

I find The Flash refreshing, if for no other reason that, with all the superhero stuff out there right now (Arrow, Gotham, SHIELD), it is nice to have something with an actual superhero, complete with a costume and powers.

Rip wrote:Perhaps it is just me but I like Gotham MUCH more than Flash.

I like them both quite a bit.

Playing Injustice with Shazam always cracks me up.

His constant shouting of SHAZAM!!! when he uses certain powers is hilarious ^^. I hope they don't do it too much in the movie

I've been loving the Flash. It has a great silver age feel to it. It's my favorite comic book related show right now.

I used to travel to DC around this time of year -- when my nieces and nephews were young, I would Xmas shop for them at the Smithsonian. That (as well as all other non-Philippines travel) ended when I started a relationship with my wife.

If I'm being honest with myself, I've always been a DC fan at heart. It started with the Justice League cartoons and reading Batman comics. Later in my teens I dabbled in X-Men and Spider-Man, but I never really loved those characters the way I did some of the DC ones.

Intellectually I know that Marvel has the better overall line-up of heroes, but if I could only read one or the other from here on out, I'd have to go with my childhood favorite. I've always kind of seen DC as the underdog, and that kind of endears me to them. It's easy to make a cool Iron Man story. It takes effort to make a cool Aquaman story.

While I love the Marvel movies, I tend to prefer DC comics. DC's characters lend themselves to grander, more mythic stories.

If the DC movies really want to win me over, the next titles on their slate would be:

Elongated Man Mysteries
Justice League 3: Identity Crisis

Flash has been great, but Arrow just blows everything else away. Season 2 was just an amazing rollercoaster.

YellowKing wrote:If I'm being honest with myself, I've always been a DC fan at heart. It started with the Justice League cartoons and reading Batman comics. Later in my teens I dabbled in X-Men and Spider-Man, but I never really loved those characters the way I did some of the DC ones.

I was born at just the right time that just as I became old enough to start to appreciate superheroes, the first Christoper Reeve Superman movie came out, and Superfriends was on Saturday mornings. Combine that with constant reruns of the Adventures of Superman (George Reeves) on TV. Marvel back then didn't have much of a TV presence, other than the occasional Spiderman cameo. Later on they had The Incredible Hulk with Bill Bixby, which I watched, but was a bit too young to really appreciate the stories. Preferring DC over Marvel isn't a big surprise for me.

By the early 80s, I was too into 'military' entertainment (A-Team, GI Joe) to really follow any superheroes, and I just never got back into them. I never, ever read comics. Until, that is, a few years ago when Arkham Asylum (the game) came out. I started playing and remembered a few things from when I was a kid, but most of the characters were a mystery to me. I shelved it and went out and started reading old comics, starting with Batman and spiraling out from there. Now I'm hooked again, and read DC stuff fairly regularly.

I still don't know Marvel. Every time they introduce a character in a film or in Agents of Shield, I have to go look them up (not that I don't love learning.)

Grantland ran a piece about the new Marvel lineup, but it also contained a bit of discussion about why the Marvel movies seem to be getting bigger play these days.

I’m reminded of an anecdote about the time jazz-fusion guitarist Larry Coryell tried to outdo Jimi Hendrix in a guitar duel. Coryell played about a million notes from a complex cascade of scales and Hendrix replied by turning his amp up to seared-earth levels and, with one note, wiped away everything Coryell had done. This is the difference between the way Marvel Studios and Warner/DC make their announcements. Even when DC manages to get an edge, as with their Wonder Woman and Cyborg announcements, Marvel just does its thing so loudly that no one notices the weak spots.

EzeKieL wrote:Playing Injustice with Shazam always cracks me up.

His constant shouting of SHAZAM!!! when he uses certain powers is hilarious ^^. I hope they don't do it too much in the movie

I'm old enough that the whole "call him Shazam" thing is hard to get past.

Shazam is the Wizard; Billy Batson is Captain Marvel!

I never had a problem keeping the various Kree/light/energy Marvel comics incarnations confused with the DC magic based one. Now. qucikly walk across my lawn! (not so old as to tell you to get off it)

Blackhawk wrote:

Rip wrote:Perhaps it is just me but I like Gotham MUCH more than Flash.

I find The Flash refreshing, if for no other reason that, with all the superhero stuff out there right now (Arrow, Gotham, SHIELD), it is nice to have something with an actual superhero, complete with a costume and powers.

I agree with you. The Flash has had the Flash doing flashy stuff since the start, you can't beat that. I gave up on Gotham but saw the last one since Ben Edlund wrote it, and I was impressed at how good it was. The problem? No Batman, no anyone superhero-y. A gritty crime show, nicely done, but that's what it is and I've seen my share. Agents of Shield is very good now, imo, but it took almost an entire season to get there and there is still no regular superhero-y character, not even a B list one.

I'm also enjoying Constantine. I like the lead actor, he's got the charisma to carry a show, and there's plenty of his powers and related phenomenon going on. A lot of sympathetic and/or innocent people die on that show which I like to see. Not because I'm evil, but because it makes the stakes seem higher. Nothing kills the dramatic tension as much as knowing only bad guys can die on a show. The Flash has this edge too.

After watching Entourage and The Big Bang Theory, there is an actual Aquaman movie?! It could be really cool with the special effects they could do, but hasn't it been spoofed before it was ever considered seriously?

I always thought there were two things against an Aquaman movie happening. One, filming a movie on water is notoriously expensive. For the longest time water effects have been the one type of effect that isn't convincing. Now they may have reached the point in sfx where they can do an Aquaman movie without ever needing to be in more than a large pool when shooting it. The other thing is, how do you have land based action if this guy is water oriented? I think if someone can figure out a way to have a raccoon wield a gun and people accept it, making Aquaman work should be easy.

I think my wife summed up her enjoyment for The Flash:

"For once, someone who isn't depressed about having super powers!"

Now, she's from Argentina and their superhero culture is nil. I guess we're in the minority, but we also find the show Forever pretty entertaining except the part where he's always wanting to figure out how to stop living forever. We'd understand if it was for 1,000 years, but my wife thinks someone at 200 is a little whine-y.

On a side note, I think Aquaman could be cool if they had him be able to use water like Green Lantern...manipulate water constructs or something similar. But, yeah, it's a tough sell on land unless the whole deal is set underwater and they go all Game of Thrones - Waterworld Edition.

Buatha wrote: On a side note, I think Aquaman could be cool if they had him be able to use water like Green Lantern...manipulate water constructs or something similar.

That was his wife, Mera, I believe. At least it was back when I was reading comics. I seem to remember back in the time frame when he lost his hand that he had that hook/harpoon thing and he may have at some point had a hard water hook.

Different strokes for different folks: I watched the first 5-6 episodes of Arrow and, for me, it went from tepid to putrid. The pilot was good, but the only interesting parts of the continuing series were the origin story flashbacks. The family drama content was borderline nauseating. Are you guys telling me that they managed to fix that? It thought that it was a bad, and I do mean bad, show. I just didn't care about the characters. It was a disappointing, non-heroic, superhero(ish) soap opera.

Admittedly, I generally dislike the CW style of show. They all tend to devolve into soaps. I have a hard time staying interested in Supernatural, which the wife loves. But, its much better than some of the other CW efforts. The Flash is OK so far -- mostly for the reasons Blackhawk mentions (i.e. an actual super hero with costume, powers, and interesting origins). I may end up liking it as much as I did Smallville.

BTW - loving both Gotham and Constantine here. These are more like it!

Cylus Maxii wrote:The family drama content was borderline nauseating. Are you guys telling me that they managed to fix that?

I stopped watching Arrow because of the whole family angle while, ironically, my wife kept watching it.

My wife isn't a fan of Gotham, which is probably going in the discard pile, but she's liking Constantine...go figure.

My wife isn't a fan of Gotham, which is probably going in the discard pile, but she's liking Constantine...go figure.

I listen to the Screenrant.com podcast, and they were saying a few episodes ago that they thought even though Constantine might be the worst of the new superhero shows, they thought it probably had one of the best chances of catching on with mainstream viewers. I haven't watched it yet but I've been DVRing them.

Cylus Maxii wrote:Different strokes for different folks: I watched the first 5-6 episodes of Arrow and, for me, it went from tepid to putrid. The pilot was good, but the only interesting parts of the continuing series were the origin story flashbacks. The family drama content was borderline nauseating. Are you guys telling me that they managed to fix that? It thought that it was a bad, and I do mean bad, show. I just didn't care about the characters. It was a disappointing, non-heroic, superhero(ish) soap opera.

Admittedly, I generally dislike the CW style of show. They all tend to devolve into soaps. I have a hard time staying interested in Supernatural, which the wife loves. But, its much better than some of the other CW efforts. The Flash is OK so far -- mostly for the reasons Blackhawk mentions (i.e. an actual super hero with costume, powers, and interesting origins). I may end up liking it as much as I did Smallville.

BTW - loving both Gotham and Constantine here. These are more like it!

Yes and no. It definitely has some soap opera drama during the first season, but it most definitely ends in Season 2. The show goes from somewhat watchable, to very very dark in S2. I think it just took some time to hit their stride. But I don't think it will do enough to change your negative opinion about it. It is the first DC based comic show that I like better than Marvel.

The Flash continues to be in a dead heat for my favorite superhero show, along with Agents of SHIELD. And tonight we got both Plastique and...

Cylus Maxii wrote:Different strokes for different folks: I watched the first 5-6 episodes of Arrow and, for me, it went from tepid to putrid. The pilot was good, but the only interesting parts of the continuing series were the origin story flashbacks. The family drama content was borderline nauseating. Are you guys telling me that they managed to fix that? It thought that it was a bad, and I do mean bad, show. I just didn't care about the characters. It was a disappointing, non-heroic, superhero(ish) soap opera.

Admittedly, I generally dislike the CW style of show. They all tend to devolve into soaps. I have a hard time staying interested in Supernatural, which the wife loves. But, its much better than some of the other CW efforts. The Flash is OK so far -- mostly for the reasons Blackhawk mentions (i.e. an actual super hero with costume, powers, and interesting origins). I may end up liking it as much as I did Smallville.

BTW - loving both Gotham and Constantine here. These are more like it!

I don't know how you can complain about family drama in Arrow and then turn around and say you liked Smallville, which spent its first several seasons as more Dawson's Creek than Superman.

I like the Flash so far, while it's still in the not yet a soap opera phase. It's clearly coming, but it's not annoying yet, and at least some of the soap operaness is going to actually have something to do with the super hero part of the show. I totally agree with Cylus about Arrow. The origin story flashbacks are far and away the best part and are really the only reason I made it into season 2, but I stopped watching last year. I don't know if I'll start again.

On this week's Flash,

hentzau wrote:Plastique

I bet hentazu's Wiki leak has comic book logic for why this doesn't happen. Complaining is fun too.

And also, what kind of dumbass window washer works at night?

Spoiler:

Gorilla Grodd! Admittedly, it's no Ape City Gorilla Grodd, but I'll take it!

Yeah, I'm sure for fans of the comic that was great, but it was a very weird non sequitur for the rest of us

YellowKing wrote:If I'm being honest with myself, I've always been a DC fan at heart. It started with the Justice League cartoons and reading Batman comics. Later in my teens I dabbled in X-Men and Spider-Man, but I never really loved those characters the way I did some of the DC ones.

Intellectually I know that Marvel has the better overall line-up of heroes, but if I could only read one or the other from here on out, I'd have to go with my childhood favorite. I've always kind of seen DC as the underdog, and that kind of endears me to them. It's easy to make a cool Iron Man story. It takes effort to make a cool Aquaman story.

Complete opposite for me. Superman never really clicked with me. Too powerful and never the underdog unless someone takes his powers away pretty much. Hence only one interesting villain. I've had zero desire to see any of the newer superman movies, though smallville was entertaining for awhile, but more for the Lex Luthor storylines than Clark Kent. Batman has some really interesting villains, and I loved the original TV show.

Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four were always great though. Daredevil is a great character too. Iron Man was a good one too, and I do like the Technology vs Magic/Superstition line in that. It will be very interesting to see where IM 4 goes, if/when it happens - I really wanted a real Mandarin storyline, and I still hope that Kingsley's actor was a veneer over the true Mandarin.

Superman's invincibility and power have always been a problem for his writers. That's why the best Superman stories have villains tackle his morality rather than his flesh. You're a god. You can do anything. But should you?

I was an equal opportunity comics fan. Loved both DC and Marvel. In my "golden age" of comics, my top 10 comics (INPO) were:

The New Teen Titans (Wolfman and Perez)
Legion of SuperHeroes
Superman Comics (John Byrne reboot era)
Spider-man Comics
Fantastic Four (John Byrne era)
X-Men (Claremont Era)
Justice Society of America
Sandman (Neil Gaiman reboot)
Swamp Thing (Alan Moore era)
Daredevil (Frank Miller era)

I know that Batman is conspicuously absent...I've never been a big fan of Batman EXCEPT for the animated series.

In my heyday, I was buying 20-30 comics a week. When I read comics, I would always read them least favorite to most favorite, saving those favorite ones for the last reads. Of the comics above, Legion of SuperHeroes was always my last read, no matter what else I had. I have always unabashedly loved the LSH.

tiny ogre wrote:The origin story flashbacks are far and away the best part and are really the only reason I made it into season 2, but I stopped watching last year. I don't know if I'll start again.

Season 2 is on Netflix. No excuse not to watch it!

Ok that Flash and Arrow first crossover kicked ass. Speaking of kicking ass...

(spoiler from episode)

I thought the episode was great...and I know this is a TV show and all...but I thought Iris's reaction at the end seemed awfully contrived. So, all of his previous exploits are ruined by one negative event? It's not like they're married.

Blackhawk wrote: Suicide Squad – August 5th, 2016

Casting

Here’s the official cast/character list:

Jared Leto – The Joker

Will Smith – Deadshot

Tom Hardy – Rick Flag[g]

Margot Robbie – Harley Quinn

Jai Courtney – Boomerang

Cara Delevingne – Enchantress

“Suicide Squad,” directed by David Ayer and produced by Charles Roven and Richard Suckle, will begin shooting next April in Toronto.

The first site I was going to link had Margot Kidder as Harley Quinn.

Flash tonight was incredible.

I mean FIRESTORM!



/nerdgasm

I remember buying Firestorm #1 in 1982. I'm still in shock that it made to primetime.

It's so obvious now. The other red speedster had to be.........

Isgrimnur wrote:

Blackhawk wrote: Suicide Squad – August 5th, 2016

Casting

Tom Hardy – Rick Flag[g]

He's out.

Tom Hardy has dropped out of Suicide Squad, Warner Bros.’ all-star comic book movie being directed by David Ayer. Not losing a beat, the studio has made overtures to Jake Gyllenhaal, who has generated heat for his performance in Nightcrawler, to replace Hardy.
...
Hardy’s exit is due to scheduling, according to sources. The actor is currently shooting The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s frontier drama that also stars Leonardo DiCaprio, and that shoot is now looking to go longer than initially planned.

Hardy is also starring in Mad Max: Fury Road for Warners, which opens May 15, smack in the middle of Suicide filming. Suicide is due to begin shooting mid-April in Toronto, but Hardy will have press commitments for Fury Road that will take him around the world.

Gyllenhaal has an offer to replace Hardy but it's unclear whether or not the actor will take it on. Gyllenhaal, who worked with Ayer on the acclaimed police thriller End of Watch, is currently on Broadway for his play Constellations. The play runs until mid-March. It's unknown whether that gives the actor enough prep time or down time for a prolonged shoot.

I'm loving Arrow and Flash, but I thought the latest Superman movie was borderline dreadful, and their movies are all going for that "bitter, dark, and angry" vibe. I think the DC movies are going to suck. I grew up a hardcore DC fan, but the New 52 finally drove me to stop reading comics, and all the good non-Nolan superhero flicks are Marvel films. It's a strange world.

Fireball wrote:and their movies are all going for that "bitter, dark, and angry" vibe. I think the DC movies are going to suck.

This worries me, too. Dark and humorless is not what has made superheroes so popular lately, and it is not what has always given DC its unique flavor. We won't know until the next couple of movies come out, but it is a worrisome direction for DC to take.

Blackhawk wrote:

Fireball wrote:and their movies are all going for that "bitter, dark, and angry" vibe. I think the DC movies are going to suck.

This worries me, too. Dark and humorless is not what has made superheroes so popular lately, and it is not what has always given DC its unique flavor. We won't know until the next couple of movies come out, but it is a worrisome direction for DC to take.

The idiots at Warner Bros and DC think that the Batman movies were successful because they were dark. They were not — they were successful because they were good Batman movies. A good Superman movie shouldn't be dark. Nor should a good Wonder Woman or Green Lantern or Flash movie.

Zack Snyder is a talent-free hack, and he's going to brutalize the DC characters while getting paid millions to do so.

Dark, humorless Flash. That... makes sense?