This is an open letter to the executives of the new Warner Brothers Discovery company from a longtime fan of one of your products.
First, congratulations on your new merger. I won’t say it is an “acquisition” because I know the majority of the new company is still owned by the one-time cellphone service that gobbled up everything it can like Pac-Man over the decades until it became just another one of a handful of huge mega-conglomerates. In fact, I question even the rationale of buying the mess that is Time-Warner only to turn around and spin it off like they did DirecTV.
But, nonetheless, the deal is done and you’re the new bosses of this huge venture, and so I have a few things to say that you really should hear.
First, if you do somehow come across this open letter and you do some looking into this online column that’s been around since the early years of the World Wide Web, you’ll notice that I do talk a lot about politics, but I’m also a longtime fan of one of your products, namely DC Comics. You probably know it as DC Entertainment.
I grew up with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and all the other legends of the DC Universe. I used to watch the animated stories of Superman and Batman. I was thrilled with the campy Batman live-action TV series. I enjoyed seeing Wonder Woman on TV. I was blown away when Superman, and later Batman, went to the big screen. I read as the vast multiverse was destroyed in “Crisis on Infinite Earths” only for it to come back again and again in various incarnations. I watched as my legends died only to come back different and even sometimes better. I’ve seen villains become heroes and back to being villains again. I saw heroes get married and become parents and pass their titles to the next generation.
Not only that, but it is because of my love of heroes and superheroes that I became not only a writer, but a self-published comic book creator, with original characters inspired by those very legends that I grew up with.
So you might say that I’ve got a stake in that product that you’ve just acquired, as one of countless consumers over the decades. We’ve bought and read those comics. We eagerly awaited the next live-action TV episode and animated shows. We bought those direct-to-video DC animated movies. We waited in line for the box-office premieres. We played the characters online and subscribed to the streaming services. We have paid the way for your product to be where it is today.
That said, I was glad to hear your new CEO, David Zaslav, say that DC Entertainment is in need of an overhaul. That, while there are gems in certain movies and TV shows, many of their mainstay characters – specifically Superman, the first iconic figure for DC – are being underused and are languishing in obscurity. This is absolutely true and has been going on for decades.
DC Entertainment productions have stumbled and fumbled while Disney-owned Marvel has been soaring with their movies and streaming specials. They’ve been making billions while DC and WB have struggled to break even.
So if you, the folks at WBD, happened to come across this article, I hope you will take these suggestions from a longtime fan and valued customer into consideration.
First, forget trying to be like Marvel. Marvel and DC are opposites in how they approach heroes. Marvel takes gods and make them mortal. Captain America is just a grown-up kid from Brooklyn. Iron Man is a narcissistic drunk with money. Thor, the “God of Thunder”, is really just an alien from another planet. Spider-Man is a teen slumming in Queens. DC takes ordinary people and turns them into legends. A farmboy from Kansas becomes Superman, Earth’s mightiest defender. An orphan becomes Batman, the world’s greatest detective and master strategist and fighter. A burned-out fighter pilot becomes Green Lantern, interplanetary cop. Don’t think that you can simply copy Marvel’s formula and make billions at the box office. You saw what happened with “Justice League”.
Speaking of “Justice League”, I strongly suggest that the first thing you do with DC Entertainment is that you fire all of the clock-watchers and penny-pinchers in your executive talent pool. Or, at the very least, you send them back to whatever Six Flags operation they came from. One of the main villains of the abomination that was the 2017 movie was the WB executive who demanded the movie be no longer than two hours, which made it the hack-job it was. WB wanted it to be like Marvel’s “Avengers”, right down to bringing in that film’s original director and bringing in a ton of needless camp. When the original director, Zach Snyder, was given the money and time to properly finish his original work and released it in 2021, it was just over four hours long, but it told the story and did all the characters right. It got Oscar recognition, while the 2017 film got the “Golden Schmoes” award for biggest disappointment.
Executive entertainment hacks think that you should sacrifice story for maximum theatre exposure. This applies not only to the movies, but also to the straight-to-video animated releases. “Superman: Doomsday” was an abomination because they wanted to keep the time limited. But when the story was retold as two movies – “The Death of Superman” and “Reign of the Supermen” – everything was fleshed out perfectly. Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” and New Line Cinema’s “The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King” were both over three hours long, but they not only told their stories well, they also scored huge box office money, despite having that “limited theater exposure”.
The message is this: if it takes three or four hours to tell a story right, then take the time and do it right.
One of the reasons why characters like Superman have been underutilized is because of some asinine belief by entertainment execs that you can’t have the same character in both live-action movies and TV shows at the same time. As long as Superman was appearing in “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman” and “Justice League”, you can’t have him on the CW. But once Henry Cavil was benched as Superman, that was supposedly okay for Tyler Hoechin to be Superman in “Superman & Lois” on the CW. And yet during the five-part CW crossover event “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, you had Tyler representing CW’s Superman working along with Brandon Routh, who played Superman in “Superman Returns” and represented the cinematic version of Superman. A live-action appearance of Bruce Wayne played by the actor who voiced him in the animated series. The appearances of the 1966 Robin and the stars of “Smallville” and brief appearances of “Titans” and “Doom Patrol” and “Swamp Thing” on HBO Max. There was even a meeting between CW’s Flash and the “Justice League” Flash and a comic-book tie-in. The media multiverse endured and viewers did not lose their minds over the mingling of genres.
People will not be confused between what’s on TV and what’s in the theatres, any more than they would be confused between what’s in the comics and what’s airing on HBO Max or the CW.
That brings me to the CW network.
Some idiot, or a bunch of idiots, think that it would be best of the CW was sold off. Since the WBD is now a co-owner of this network, and many of their best DC Entertainment talent is on the CW, this jeopardizes the company.
The idea that a network is “profitable” is about as muddied as those “Terms of Service” letters you get in the mail from your credit card lender. I get that Viacom and WBD have their own streaming platforms now, but it’s asinine to expect to sell the network to some other company and yet still keep the content that made it the draw it is. This is also one of the reasons why the CW’s hero-themed shows are either getting cancelled or are on the verge of being cancelled. They don’t know if they even have a network to call home now.
This, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a mistake. A huge, phenomenal mistake. Viacom has its own major broadcast network called CBS. Disney has ABC. Comcast has NBC. WBD only has a handful of cable channels which are becoming cookie-cutter copies of each other. You’re the ones that will be left without a broadcast presence if you let this sale go through.
If, however, you decide to do the stupid and make the phenomenal mistake of selling off the network, I strongly suggest you move all the hero shows to HBO Max or possibly come up with a free ad-paid streaming service, like what Amazon did with IMDB TV (soon to be “Freevee”). Many of your network fans… aka your consumers… can’t afford the monthly subscription of HBO Max, or perhaps they just don’t want to make the leap to a subscription service. Their biggest fear as expressed in the various social media posts I come across is they don’t want to see the shows they love suddenly go behind a subscription wall. Airing them on an ad-paid streaming service would keep them connected to those programs. You’re doing this already with the CW app. At least fight to keep that part of the CW network for yourself.
That brings us to the CW hero shows themselves. I know the COVID global pandemic has put a serious hindrance on crossovers, but the CW spent all that time in 2019 and 2020 to bring the various shows together and unite them either on one planet or part of a renewed connected multiverse. Even if they can’t be physically in the other shows, there should be at the very least an acknowledgement that these other characters still exist, even if made in passing. “Supergirl” had John Diggle from “Arrow” show up and quote something from “Black Lightning”. “The Flash” brought in several characters from other shows together for a five-part special. But “Superman & Lois” are in their second season and still act like there is nothing else in the universe aside from a one-time Diggle appearance. Again, you don’t have to have the actors show up physically, but you can at least mention them. Acknowledge they exist.
Here's the last piece of advice… you do not need to keep re-inventing the hero in order to “revitalize” him or her. Build from the talent you already have. You have a great cinematic Superman in Henry Cavil. He has the look and feel of the late Christopher Reeve. You don’t need to recast Superman or re-tell Superman’s origins. Michael Keaton is coming back as Batman, but you do not need to keep rehashing Batman’s origin story. Keep Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Jason Momoa as Aquaman. Build from their past movies, don’t hit the reboot button.
Let’s get brutally honest here… Warner Brothers Discovery has to make some serious investing if they want to see DC Entertainment get back to the top of the entertainment world. They need to invest money, of course, but they also need to invest attention. Don’t let CW shows languish in their own little programming worlds. Give them the connectivity they need. Spend the money on bringing those big-screen hero movies to life and forget about counting the minutes it takes to tell the story. If the movie shows the characters in the proper light and tells the story that needs to be told, it will bring the audience back over and over again and the movie theatres will have to keep running that movie over and over. That is how you generate maximum box office revenue. It does not come through cutting story to conform to some artificial deadline.
Warner Brothers has been around long enough to remember back when going to the movies were a huge ordeal, with runtimes so long that there were forced intermissions. Today we may look at those classics as overblown and maybe even overdramatic, but, back in the day, they brought in the masses and they made the money that made WB exist as it does today. It would be folly to think that any media executive could magically make the business of entertaining and telling stories happen by making mergers and cutting corners and runtimes.
But, really, who am I to say this? Other than a storyteller myself as well as one of your many consumers and fans. The very kind of people that you need to make it all happen.
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