GETTING DC COMICS' CHARACTERS BACK ON THEIR LIVE-ACTION FEET

I miss the old "bullet" logo.

In my last "Pete Saves" piece, I wrote about how I would have made BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE.  It's a great candidate for my treatment since it really was pretty rough.  Likewise, the live-action world of DC Comics is pretty rough.  While Warner Brothers and DC have made millions off of recent live-action versions of DC Comics properties, it can easily be argued that they could be making even more if the quality of the stories and characters was more toward the level of Marvel's Cinematic Universe.  This is the key to turning things around for Warner's efforts with DC's characters.

Full disclosure, I've always been more of a Marvel Comics guy.  Something about the real life problems of some of their most successful characters appealed to me at a young age--even before I was aware of why it appealed to me.  That said, I still enjoyed DC's books a lot, too.  I found both the darkness of Batman and the optimism of Superman to resonate with me during my teenage years (depending on my hormones, I am guessing). 

There are also some amazing stories told with quite a few DC characters.  I'm not just talking about the obvious ones, like DARK KNIGHT RETURNS or the myriad other BATMAN titles that seem to catch all the attention.  There have been great story tellers across all of the best DC titles for decades.  Finally, we are at a place in both American and pop culture where comic books are big bucks when translated into the live-action world.  The problem lies in how you adapt the stories and the characters so that they both fit their new media and still capture the essence that made everyone fall in love with them in the first place.  That said, there is a structural issue that can have almost as big an influence on quality.

The solution is right under their noses...