Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC

by Reed Tucker

By contrast, DC had no single guiding voice; various executives throughout Warner Bros. managed its superhero films. DC was also stuck without a defining gestalt for its superhero universe after Christopher Nolan concluded his stand-alone Batman trilogy and moved on to nonsuperhero projects. Marvel had established its world, some of its characters, and the tone of its films from its very first entry, Iron Man, but DC still did not have a movie that would serve as the foundation for every project moving forward.

If you can’t even get Batman right, how in the hell do you tackle Aquaman?

Unfortunately for Warner Bros., Batman v Superman didn’t come close to living up to expectations. It used Nolan’s template from the previous three Batman movies as a starting point, then bolted on all of Zack Snyder’s polarizing trademarks, including gratuitous slo-mo and more gratuitous slo-mo.

The tone was humorless and coal-black, the story nonsensical, and the big showdown between the two heroes a bore. This was a movie that used Lex Luthor’s urine, known affectionately as “Granny’s peach tea,” as some sort of plot point. A movie with a plan from its villain so complicated that it immediately crumbles under the barest scrutiny. A movie in which Batman an...

Once again it felt that, unlike Marvel, DC lacked firm control over its product.

Marvel is the eternal hipster, while DC remains the classy, conservative uncle, forever on a quest to make itself more youthful and relevant.

In 2014 alone Marvel gave readers—among others—Original Sin, which promised to “reveal shocking secrets about every major Marvel character!” Axis, which the company trumpeted would “change everything!” and Death of Wolverine, “the single most important X-Men event of the decade.”

It was terrible.

That same year DC had Superman: Doomed (“the super-event you have been waiting for”) and Futures End, which the company boasted would “forever alter the direction” of the DC universe.

They sucked.

When Marvel licensed the Fantastic Four to Fox years ago, the studio argued that a successful movie would drive comic book sales, so Fox demanded a royalty on sales of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, according to artist and Image cofounder Erik Larsen. Marvel opted to cancel the book, preferring not to pay Fox and to promote a rival studio’s property.