DC has stopped trying to beat Marvel at its own game

After years of attempting to repeat the success of Marvel Studios by, basically, attempting to repeat Marvel Studio’s model of moviemaking, Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment may have uncovered an alternate path to success… by letting DC be DC.

Last month’s San Diego Comic-Con has sparked discussion about DC’s “new direction,” post-Justice League (and the failure, thereof). In some sense, this is a bit of a misnomer, especially when it comes to movies like Aquaman and Wonder Woman 1984 — after all, both of those movies firmly exist in the same universe as what has come before, without any sizable retcons or rewrites of the previous movies. While there’s clearly a visual and tonal shift from the Zack Snyder Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in both, that had already started with 2017’s Wonder Woman, and even continued in Justice League, directed in part by Snyder, with Joss Whedon. If this was a “new direction,” it’s more than a year old already.