After the ruthless cancellation of Batgirl, fans of the DCEU are going to need to be won over by David Zaslav and his team in a major way, with the recently-installed CEO outlining his plans for the future of the superhero franchise by intimating that a Marvel-esque 10-year plan is in the offing.
Of course, longtime supporters of the shared mythology will be treating the news with trepidation, seeing as they’ve been down this road once before, only to be left crushingly disappointed. Once upon a time (almost a decade ago, to be precise), the DCEU boasted a packed slate of projects, but almost half of them didn’t happen, while The Flash still isn’t releasing until next summer.
Sure, we ended up with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Shazam!, and Aquaman, but fans don’t even regard the theatrical edition of Justice League as being worth their time. In addition, the second and third installments in Zack Snyder’s all-star trilogy, Ben Affleck’s The Batman, Green Lantern Corps., and Ray Fisher’s standalone Cyborg effort all fell by the wayside.
If you want to dig even deeper, there’s also Joe Manganiello’s solo Deathstroke film, the Joker and Harley Quinn spinoff starring Jared Leto and Margot Robbie, David Ayer’s Gotham City Sirens, Ava DuVernay’s New Gods, and James Wan’s The Trench. That being said, the old regime wasn’t exactly held in the highest of regard by the fandom, so there might be reasons for DCEU veterans to remain cautiously optimistic, but the Batgirl fiasco hasn’t gotten things off to the strongest of starts.
