Marvel And DC Are Having A War No One Is Talking About
For DC fans, it’s been a rough few years. The DCEU has its fans (Snyder Bros, are you still pretending Rebel Moon was good?), but that failed cinematic universe mostly got its teeth kicked in each and every year by the MCU. Still, fans of heroes like Batman and Superman could take solace in one thing when arguing with Marvel fanboys: that DC has always had better animation, from groundbreaking TV shows to consistently awesome cartoon movies. However, the war is shifting, and the quality of X-Men ‘97 as well as the buzz around Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man means Marvel may become the new king of cartoons.
How The Marvel DC Animation War Started
Arguably, the rivalry between Marvel and DC’s animation creators hit its stride back in the ‘90s. The two companies had produced some standout cartoons before (like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends for Marvel and Super Friends for DC), but the ‘90s gave us X-Men: The Animated Series, the legendary cartoon that eventually led to the excellent X-Men ‘97. This show and Spider-Man: The Animated Series would have helped Marvel’s animators dominate the entire decade if not for a little show called Batman: The Animated Series.
That Batman series built off the momentum of Tim Burton’s excellent live-action films and was popular enough that we got several spinoffs, including Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League, and Batman Beyond. These series all existed in the shared DC Animated Universe, and the DCAU ironically proved to be a much more successful cinematic universe than the later DCEU. While Marvel continued to produce some fun stuff over the next few years (including the fan-favorite X-Men: Evolution), DC kept its reputation as the undisputed masters of animation with shows like Teen Titans and Young Justice as well as a string of awesome direct-to-video animated movies.
How The Marvel DC Animation War Is Going
Considering that Marvel has spent decades getting its butt kicked by DC’s rival animation departments, why do we think that the house Stan Lee built is about to take this cartoon crown? For one thing, X-Men ‘97 was better than anyone ever hoped it could be, quickly establishing itself as the best-animated superhero show since Batman: The Animated Series. And while we’ve only seen a trailer so far, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man looks to continue Marvel’s animation domination by telling clever, modernized stories using an animation style that hearkens back to the Web-Head’s earliest designs.
Even as Marvel’s animators are starting to feel themselves, DC’s animation is failing to make the impact it once did. For example, the most recent “original” film was a two-part adaptation of Watchmen that didn’t resonate with fans, and even the movie’s biggest defenders will reluctantly admit that this is another meaningless adaptation of Alan Moore’s classic comic that fails to capture its original magic. The biggest misstep, however, may actually be Batman: Caped Crusader, an Amazon-exclusive show everyone thought would be a monster hit.
The show is created by Batman: The Animated Series creator Bruce Timm and set in the ‘30s, and it made a big splash with critics: on Rotten Tomatoes, Caped Crusader has a critical rating of 94 percent, with critics. Notably, though, the Popcornmeter shows audiences giving the show a much more dismal 55 percent, with some fans disliking the major changes the series makes to characters like Harley Quinn and even Bruce Wayne. Others took exception to the poor animation, and it’s hard to deny that this show isn’t nearly as great as Timm’s earlier work.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s X-Men ‘97 was a hit all the way across the board, sparking strong rumors of a new interconnected cartoon universe that threatens to completely leave DC’s modern animation efforts in the dust. Meanwhile, DC’s best animator came back to try to replicate the magic of Batman: The Animated Series and fell well short of the mark. This is the year that will determine if the live-action DCU will be a hit with movie lovers, but when it comes to cartoons, audiences already have an old rallying cry for a new year: “make mine Marvel.”
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