Diana Prince, cameo queen

I have to wonder how Gal Gadot feels about being asked to lend her star wattage in cameos in other DC movies, when they won't even make a third Wonder Woman movie.

The Flash marks the second 2023 DC film, and the second 2023 DC film in which Diana Prince makes a cameo. 

It's not a spoiler to mention The Flash, because the cameo comes in the first 15 minutes. It may be a spoiler to mention SPOILER ALERT Shazam: Fury of the Gods, because they hold that one to the very end and I'm sure they wanted us all to be surprised. Of course, we live in an era where everyone is all too eager to report that stuff, and who really cares about this kind of spoiler anyway. (Mine was a fairly ineffectual spoiler alert because the image above is from this movie.)

Well, it isn't obvious from either cameo that Gadot is annoyed, but I can't imagine she wouldn't be.

Now we all know Wonder Woman 1984 wasn't great, but I think we can all also admit it wasn't terrible. Okay, some people thought it was terrible. My love for the first movie and Gadot's performance in it probably allowed me to cut it some slack and give it a passing grade of three stars. But whatever you thought about it, the first was great and the character deserved to have a chance at a third.

There are a number of rumors floating out there about why it was cancelled, from Patty Jenkins walking away (that idea may have come from the fact that she was trying to juggle responsibilities on the Star Wars movie Rogue Squadron, which has also been cancelled) to DC changing the way it's doing things (an idea supported by the fact that The Flash is considered to be the last film in the DCEU). The reality is, studios bend and break their own rules if they think there is a reason to do so, and apparently they just didn't think WW3 would have the legs to be a success. 

Then why keep putting Gadot's legs in your movies?

I can't necessarily say that I'm frustrated that there will be no Wonder Woman 3, in a vacuum. Any indication that our unquenchable appetite for superhero movies might be dying off strikes me as a good sign for the movies. I'm not saying we have to get rid of them altogether, but maybe each studio gets to make one each year and that's it. I think their scarcity would certainly make us appreciate them more.

No, it's more like why does Wonder Woman not get a third movie when so many lesser properties do? I'm sure someone is out there making Venom 3 -- in fact, I've just confirmed it on IMDB -- and the first one of those movies was shite. I didn't see the second. 

Even more interesting about this whole "end the DCEU thing" is that The Flash is actually really good. Say what you want about Ezra Miller, you have every right and it's deserved, but Andy Muschietti delivered a damned entertaining movie. Don't tell me someone couldn't have found an awesome way to go with Wonder Woman in one more movie. And it wouldn't even have to have included all these other fools, because she was essentially the only superhero in the first two. 

But the really sad thing is: Without any of these other movies, we may not even see Gadot as Wonder Woman again. In fact, I think that's most likely. 

And try as she might, she just hasn't quite been able to duplicate that appeal in her other projects.

A Cyborg movie? Aquaman 2? 

Anything for one more movie from the cameo queen.*

*But wait a minute ... they are making an Aquaman 2. I forgot about the whole recasting of Amber Heard controversy. So why are they saying The Flash is the last movie of the DCEU? I can't keep any of this straight anymore. 

Layer upon layer of really real-ness

I haven't seen Joker yet -- today, probably -- but I have a theory why we continue to hunger for this material even though DC seems intent on forever screwing it up.

It's because each new incarnation of the DC comic book characters purports to be the "really real" version.

While some comic book movies have been made with an eye for approximating an actual comic book, DC has taken the opposite approach, and it seems like we are at least in theory open to it.

Since Batman is the throughline here, let's look at it from his vantage point.

The first Batman movie was in 1966, and it was total camp, even for the time. I haven't actually seen it, but I feel like I can say this without second-guessing myself. The way you approximated a comic book at that time was to have words like POW! and BANG! on the screen in big letters. That was about all you could do because there was no way to really approximate the look of comic book panels, or anything but the most basic special effects.

When Tim Burton's 1989 Batman came out, it promised to be dark and brooding, which moved it a step away from the original comics, giving it the feel that the comics had taken on since then (or so I assume -- again, I was not a reader). "Dark and brooding" was, of course, more "realistic," as a real person forever avenging his parents' death in a spandex outfit would probably not have the groovy vibe of Adam West's version.

By the time Batman and Robin, the fourth film in that series, came out, the series had descended back into a cartoonish type of camp that almost resembled the 1966 film (if only it could have been more like it, we might have actually liked it). That meant the world was ready for Christopher Nolan's take on the character in 2005, which matched an increasingly sophisticated filmmaking with an even darker take on the character set in consummately realistic settings. This was what Batman would really look like in the real world.

Then Batman got caught up in the attempt to make Superman more realistic. You could argue Bryan Singer tried to do that with Superman Returns, but Zack Snyder again pitched that as our reason to get interested in Superman again with Man of Steel, in which we see a lengthy back story of Clark Kent working on a deep sea trawler and the like. How can you get more realistic than Superman working on a deep sea trawler? But by the time Batman got involved in this with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder's "even darker" (is it possible?) take on the characters backfired and became kind of ridiculous, again creating the conditions for another reset, another stab toward greater realism in the conception of this character.

I have to assume that reset will be what we get with 2021's The Batman, but for now, we're seeing it in the form of Joker, which will surely be simpatico with the vision of the DC anti-hero that Matt Reeves has planned for his film. (Will Joaquin Phoenix's Joker even be in that film? Not sure.)

What I believe we will be seeing in Joker is the most "realistic" version of this character yet, though you'd have to think Nolan did a pretty good job back in 2008 with The Dark Knight. And by that it seems to mean an independent film-style psychological profile of a character who will later be fighting characters in spandex, though I don't expect to be seeing them in this movie. In fact, I kind of wonder if the intended audience for a DC film will even like it -- a supposition supported by the fact that the movie won the top prize at Venice.

Given that many of DC's movies have been very poorly received -- Batman v. Superman, Justice League, Suicide Squad -- I have many times wondered why they haven't just sent these characters into hibernation for ten years. The most obvious answer, the one we don't even need to go beyond, is that these movies will make money no matter how terrible they are. The second most obvious answer is that they've made movies that have been received extremely well (Wonder Woman) and "better than their worst" (Aquaman). But if you are being less cynical, each time out there seems to be a genuine aesthetic argument to reenvision these characters. And most of the time, that aesthetic is based on the idea of further imagining "what this would really be like in real life."

Joker seems to be a hit, so maybe that means the next wave of DC movies -- which I feel like we are hearing about constantly -- will be tolerable. Because lord knows reviews from critics haven't slowed them down. Birds of Prey, an attempt to reclaim Harley Quinn even though she was portrayed by this same actress in one of DC's biggest turds, hits theaters next year, followed by The Batman and at some point James Gunn's reimagining of that aforementioned turd, Suicide Squad.

Then again, Gunn didn't succeed with Guardians of the Galaxy because it was "realistic." So maybe instead of going forward with a consistent artistic vision, they'll just give each film to the filmmaker they think is best suited to tell the story, and hope for the best. Perhaps that straddling the worlds approach starts with Todd Phillips, who is not the type of "visionary" I would have expected to be given a movie that does a deep dive into the Joker's psychology, with the help of one of the best actors working today. If this works, which it appears to have, maybe anything they try will.