Marvel Needs To Steal DC’s Best Movie Idea
After years of dominating the box office, the Marvel Cinematic Universe seems like it has run out of steam: as fan-favorite characters die or retire, we have been left with a new generation of heroes nobody seems to really care about. However, what if Disney could bring back its best characters and tell fresh stories again, all without disrupting the MCU that fans know and love? The answer is easier than you might think: DC is releasing movies like Joker 2 that exist outside the DCU, and we think Marvel needs to steal this idea and create non-canonical movies of their own.
It was obvious from the very beginning that Warner Bros. wanted to copy the Marvel formula when they created the DC Extended Universe, but many of the movies ended up floundering (no offense, Aquaman). Ironically, some of the best DC movies in recent years existed outside the DCEU: Joker gave us a captivating and haunting look at Batman’s greatest foe while The Batman gave us a fresh look at the early days of The Caped Crusader. These movies were very different in tone and content, but what they had in common was that they couldn’t exist without upsetting the carefully constructed canon of the DCEU.
For all their baffling decisions in recent years, one of the smartest decisions Warner Bros. made was giving those films the greenlight, effectively deciding that telling a good story was more important than making that story fit within the restrictions of an existing cinematic universe. Now, we think Marvel could make superhero fatigue a thing of the past by stealing this idea and creating great films that they simply couldn’t tell within the confines of the MCU. For example, this would be the perfect chance to recast iconic roles for stories bringing back fan-favorite characters such as Iron Man and Captain America.
As longtime comics nerds can tell you, Marvel stealing DC’s movie idea would allow for the creation of movies we may otherwise never get. It would be cool to get a cinematic adaptation of Secret Empire, which explores the idea that Captain America might have been a secret Hydra agent all along; it would be similarly cool to see a movie focused on DoomQuest, the crazy story where Iron Man and Doctor Doom fight each other in the time of King Arthur. Cap and Iron Man being dead means those stories could never happen in the MCU, but they could still headline non-canonical solo movies.
The cherry on top of this idea is that Marvel already laid out a framework for copying this DC formula. Echo was the first of Marvel’s Spotlight Series, and the point of this series is to feature characters and stories that aren’t intimately tied to the MCU, meaning fans could fully enjoy them even if they haven’t kept up with other movies or TV shows. We think it would be easy for Marvel to separate the Spotlight Series from the MCU altogether, opening the door to some fantastic stories (an idea that seems even better given Echo’s success).
If nothing else, we think stealing this idea from the DC playbook will save Marvel time: strong rumors have suggested that Disney was going to reboot this entire universe in 2027 with Avengers: Secret Wars, but everything from the writers’ and actors’ strikes to Jonathan Majors’ legal drama has the potential to delay or derail that film. By creating films now that aren’t tied down to canon, Marvel could reap most of the benefits of a reboot long before they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a major Avengers film.
If they wait nearly half a decade or more to create films outside the MCU canon, though, Disney may very well find that superhero fatigue has destroyed all of the cinematic empire that Tony Stark built in a cave, with a box of scraps.
