Lucky you.

 

There can't possibly be anything wrong with a movie where the main antagonist looks like this:

Or maybe I'm wrong. His name's Sinestro, and he looks like Satan, but he could be a stand-up guy.
Like Severus.

 

You know from the first frame he shows up in that he's gonna go bad (but he's not actually the antagonist) and he's one of the two things this movie did right.

The other was letting us stare at Blake Lively.

 

Sinestro's character is actually pretty deep, and he's not the cookie-cutter villain that he seems to be (if you haven't read any of the comics that he appears in).

 

He's played by Mark Strong. They could cast him as Santa and he'd be an obvious villain!

 

Our mistletoes will be no match for his T.O.W. missiles.

 

You mean something like this?

 

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/batman-superman-cyborg-ray-fisher-1201163390/

Cyborg is in the Batman vs Superman movie.


Geez DC, I keep trying to root for you but every piece of news you give me just makes me dread this movie even more.

 

It depends on how they play it. Don't give Wonder Woman a large role, have her be a minor teaser-like thing for a sequel. Cyborg is related to Luthor in some way, connected to Zod's power armour. Perhaps an experiment gone wrong, similar to Metallo. Most importantly, stop adding new shit and let the movie do its own thing, instead of trying to jump straight into the Avengers phase of things.

 

Bleh. Looks like a lot of executive meddling.

Why the fuck do they have such a hard-on for Cyborg now anyway? When they put him on the Justice League back when they did the New 52 I was really confused as to why they chose him out of all the other possible candidates. He'd really only ever been a Titan as far as I know.

 

Last I heard WW is definitely getting a substantial supporting role and she's gonna be in costume and everything. They plan to release pics for WW, BM and SM in costume pretty soon to avoid leaks.

 

I don't see that going well. Wonder Woman isn't a mainstream character like Batman or Superman, she'd need some sort of introduction for most moviegoers. I don't think the movie is going to have space to fit all that in, unless it becomes Themyscira-centric in which case I think it's going to be biting off more than it can chew.

 

The reason The Avengers blew out the box offices as hard as it did is because they had half a dozen movies setting it up. Groundwork was laid for it, that it then stood upon. Without that foundation, without that setup, it would have never worked as well as it did. It was also completely unprecedented as far as blockbuster films go. That sort of trick been done in literature, radio, and even television series before, but never for multi-million dollar A-List movies. There have been movie series, and even the occasional crossover like Freddy vs Jason, but at no point has anyone ever taken a large group of associated but disparate films and tied them together like that.

First it was going to be a movie with Batman and Superman, now they're adding in Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and even Cyborg. This literally sounds exactly like what Marvel did, but without any of the setup. They're trying to make an Avengers movie that skips the movies needed to set it all up and make it work.

Trying to do it like this is like trying to tell the punchline before the joke, or like skipping the Hobbit and everything in the Lord of the Rings and going straight to the Battle for Minas Tirith. It's an In Medis Res that's dropping us right in the middle of a massive, complex crossover scenario that's going to involve at least half a dozen characters that are all protagonists in their own right, played by actors we aren't used to seeing in the roles and who don't have brand recognition, and they will, by extension and definition, be either relegated to background characters or compete for screentime in a way that leaves little to nothing left for anything remotely approaching a decent plot. Nobody is going to be able to understand what the fuck is going on. Unless the movie is twelve hours long, it's going to be an absolute clusterfuck.

The Avengers movie, through it's setup, acquired the innate advantage that fanfiction itself has, which is that everyone in the audience is at least partially aware of the people involved, the setting, and the background for what's happened thus far, which means time doesn't have to be spent explaining any of that. This frees up the current work to focus all of it's energy into being a roller coaster ride. You can jump right into the part where shit hits the fan, and devote the full focus of the entire work to that.

This movie is going to read like a piece of fanfiction for a setting you've never seen before. It'll be like starting at the halfway point of a webcomic story with two thousand pages that's been regularly updated for the better part of a decade, reading fifty pages, and then stopping. This is literally going to be what would happen if you told Peter Jackson he had to fit the entirety of the Lord of the Rings movies and also the Hobbit into a single two and a half hour span.

Unless they completely change their plans for this and dial it waaaay the hell back, this movie will hold value only for it's shiny-smashy-go-boom-boom-edness. And I suspect there will be a lot less of that and a lot more talking, given how many new characters they're just introducing out of the blue.

 

Or it could, y'know, not suck.

Edit: To clarify what I mean; this movie is not called Justice League for a reason. It's not the Avengers equivalent, not yet. It's a setup film, though admittedly it will set way too much for only one movie.

Justice League will come later.

 

Honestly at this point I have more faith in the Gritty and Grounded Reboot of the Fantastic Four that Fox is doing than Batman vs Superman.

 

They wanted a black superhero to replace Manhunter in the original Justice League lineup, realized Black Lightning would seem off from the name, didn't own Static Shock, Icon, Hardware or Rocket, Mister Terrific was a legacy (and sounds dopey), Batwing was derivative, John Stewart means they have to drop Hal Jordan (better option really), Steel is a Superman derivative, Amazing Man has had very little done with him, Jim Corrigan brings in God, Mister Bones is a skeleton, and that leaves you with Vixen and Cyborg. I'd have preferred Vixen for the difference her powers bring visually, but Cyborg has the bigger profile from years of television showings and the Teen Titans legacy.

 

Okay, but then why the fuck did they replace Martian Manhunter anyway? I mean besides just being a cool character, he's an alien shapeshifter. That's "diverse" enough as it is, I'd think, and they could just have his John Jones identity be a black guy. He's far more suited for the Justice League than Cyborg is.

I liked Cyborg better as a forever-Titan anyway. Like, being on the team meant enough to him that he sticks with it and keeps it going for the younger heroes that keep coming in.

 

This might surprise you, but people don't take kindly to the idea of diversity being an alien shapeshifter who can turn black or asian or female or whatever.

The idea you can go with for Cyborg is that he's plainly younger and thus more likely to inspire a younger generation of heroes being the youngest JL'er. Especially since Nightwing has been slowly directed back into Bat-Family shenanigans and out of JL-action.

 

Why? They clearly don't care about the actual characters, as long as the team has the requisite amount of minorities and they can pat themselves on the back for how tolerant they are. He can be literally anything they want.

Alternatively someone can finally tell them to shut the fuck up about forcing shallow diversity into everything, especially for a medium that has a pretty small audience in the first place, but that time hasn't come yet.

Anyway, yeah, it doesn't look like this movie's doing anything right. Which is sad, because I really think DC deserves a cinematic universe more than Marvel does.

 

Not really. Plenty of people are happy to see Cyborg in JL. Others are talking about better choices. A small minority is bitching that Manhunter got taken out, because let's face it: The guy's fanbase is utterly miniscule.

I don't think you get just how much seeing a superhero or character representative of you can hook you into comics. And how much more supported and popular the industry can become if they reflect the constituncies they're trying to get. The old readership isn't going anywhere after all. But getting new ones isn't as easy.