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The Avengers and the resulting effects on the tone of the MCU have ruined an entire generation of writers. It worked too well and not enough people noticed that that was mostly because it was within the context of a comic book movie with an ensemble cast. Which is seemingly the only thing Whedon can write: genre fiction with ensemble casts.
Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.
I've often wondered if the entire media landscape might be unrecognizably different if Whedon doesn't get that particular writing gig.
Nothing about Snyder's work before DCEU implies that he had to take a turn to go where he did. I think that's just who he is. I sometimes even appreciate his clear disdain for certain allegedly immovable parts of DC canon
And who he is is someone who should never have been given control of an entire cinematic universe. Zach Snyder being allowed to act as some sort of auteur or writer-director when his best works like 300 were mainly strong on visuals and he needs at least two tries to make a decent superhero movie is one of the more amazing coups in Hollywood
He really must just be a great guy to be around.
His visual flair and dubious auteur credentials aside, do you not think that the grimdark tone was reactionary? Watchmen, Sucker Punch or even his recent Rebel Moon antics, while still retaining his style were nowhere near as pompous as a Batman v Superman or even a Man of Steel.
He does have an unearned tendency to take himself way too seriously, especially now that he's selling director cuts, but I am utterly convinced that some producer shenanigans were involved to get to "do you bleed" levels.
He said this before getting Man of Steel:
So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?
My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.
Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.
Snyder was still more respectful of Watchmen in his movie adaptation than whoever is responsible for the hbo series, showing just how low fidelity has fallen.
The HBO series was fucking weird and the female lead was a good actress, but that world was just so tortured in its framing that nothing about it made sense. Vigilante police, reparations, the Klan, nightmare squid storms... its just such a baffling show so far up its own ass that there it took until the penultimate episode to figure out what the central conflict of the show was.
Everyone despises JJ Abrams Mystery Box attitude to storytelling now, but the overly convoluted framing also is Damon Lindlehofs doing. His grubby fingers are good for kneading slow burning plots like The Leftovers, but most of the time he works just collapse in the bake.
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