Both of DC’s biggest hits in the last 5 years being non-canon hammers home the franchise’s most glaring problem

Ever since the SnyderVerse was put out to pasture, the chasm between the DCU fandom has been growing ever wider, but nobody really seems to take much interest in what the general public thinks about the franchise’s ongoing civil war.

That might be because they’re not interested or completely unaware of what’s going on, to be honest. If you plucked 100 people off the street who had designs on seeing The Flash and then questioned them for their thoughts on whether or not the SnyderVerse should be restored, or their opinion on James Gunn’s suitability for both the co-CEO role and creative architect of Chapter 1: Gods & Monsters, there’s a chance they might not have a clue what you were talking about.

While it’s true that both Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash bombing can be partially attributed to their irrelevance in the grand scheme of the DCU, the fact that the two highest-grossing of the company’s comic book adaptations to have released in the five years since Aquaman set an all-time record are Joker and The Batman indicates that maybe adhering to canon and forging ahead with a shared universe isn’t even the smartest option on the table.

The aforementioned duo starring the iconic enemies comfortably out-earned Shazam!, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad, Black Adam, and Fury of the Gods, and they’re already guaranteed to handily defeat The Flash, too. That’s seven canonical under-performers in a row, and with two more still to come by the end of the year, the indictment on the apathetic approach paying customers have to a superhero shared continuity that isn’t Marvel’s could be about to get even more damning than ever before.