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DC Movies- if at first you don't succeed...


Cassandra

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OH yeah I'm sure they'll have him show up, but its not really Batman as we know the series or setting.  There have been a few great concepts showing how to handle Gotham and you didn't need to bring in all the rogue's gallery to do it.  Just a tough cop show with a gritty setting and Gordon trying his best to stay clean, maybe the Phantasm showing up as a vigilante, that kind of thing.

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I think Fox realized after the first season that a tough cop show that takes place in a pre-Batman Gotham City was never going to maintain the necessary audience after the curiosity factor wore off. It's one of those concepts that sounds interesting on paper, but turns out isn't really very appealing in reality. Consequently, they abandoned the gritty crime angle and pushed the show's Weird Factor instead, relying on the development of the classic rogue's gallery to maintain viewership.

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Well the biggest flaw with the scheme was that Gordon can't win, nothing can get better, and Gotham has to be an awful place or there's no reason for Batman.  If Gordon turns the city around and things are great, why do they need a masked hero to fight crime?  If he doesn't succeed, its just grinding misery.

 

It CAN work, as shows like Breaking Bad have shown, but it takes a particular level of talent and content that network TV isn't likely to provide.

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I don't really see why a "cleaner" Gotham wouldn't need a vigilante superhero. Even the safest cities in the world have plenty of crime. Throw in a few thematic genius baddies like Batman's rogues gallery, and you'd have plenty to keep him busy without making Gotham City an outright cesspool.

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I agree with LL. However, the show needed to decide what it was going to dramatize, and I think it had trouble figuring out what that should be.

 

On the one hand, if you take away Batman's rogues gallery and make Gotham a city full of conventional criminals and nothing more, then there's really no reason to set it in Gotham City. On the other hand, if you do add in all of Batman's villains, then you end up having Jim Gordon taking them on instead of Batman, which would be too much cognitive dissonance.

 

The last option is to show Jim Gordon cleaning up the traditional criminal element, leaving a vacuum that draws in prototypes of Batman's rogues gallery, which is what I think the show tried to do at first. But like I said, they discovered that even this "half step" towards a "real Batman show" was not enough to keep people tuning in, and so they started throwing in all of Batman's villains, in one form or another, way before they normally would have appeared and tried to make it work with a young proto-Batman and a heavy dose of Weirdness Factor.

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Miller handled the first year of Batman well by having Gordon move there that year rather than having been there for a decade before Batman showed up.  If you're going to do pre-Batman Gotham, you should focus on the crime families there and the political corruption.  Gordon could make some advances against those two without cleaning Gotham up enough to negate the need for a Batman.

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1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

If you're going to do pre-Batman Gotham, you should focus on the crime families there and the political corruption.  Gordon could make some advances against those two without cleaning Gotham up enough to negate the need for a Batman.

 

I believe such a show would still suffer from a huge case of, "But why bother watching a show set in Gotham City without Batman?" The whole notion is just plain dumb.

 

Batman: Year One was only worth reading because, at the end of the day, it was about Batman. The fact that it developed Jim Gordon a little further (than usual) was merely gravy, not the main course.

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16 hours ago, zslane said:

The last option is to show Jim Gordon cleaning up the traditional criminal element, leaving a vacuum that draws in prototypes of Batman's rogues gallery, which is what I think the show tried to do at first. But like I said, they discovered that even this "half step" towards a "real Batman show" was not enough to keep people tuning in, and so they started throwing in all of Batman's villains, in one form or another, way before they normally would have appeared and tried to make it work with a young proto-Batman and a heavy dose of Weirdness Factor.

I think they did start with this, in a lot of ways showing the origins of the rogue's gallery. A young Ivy, a young Selena, a flunky Penguin etc. All learning from mentors.

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  • 1 month later...
On 4/5/2019 at 8:41 PM, zslane said:

But like I said, they discovered that even this "half step" towards a "real Batman show" was not enough to keep people tuning in,

 

Personally, I chalk it up to horrible writing and dismal acting... as most WB shows are. But you are right, there is clearly an audience for fan-service comic book stuff, no matter how badly it is done... see Arrow, Supergirl, Flash, etc.

 

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I didn't really like Affleck as Batman, but he wasn't awful.  Then again he didn't have to do it for a full movie solo, and I just cannot see that working any better than when he was Daredevil.  Keaton was the real shocker, it frankly stuns me anyone even considered him for the role.  But he was damn fine in it.

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I think Affleck was a decent choice, and the fact that his version of the character didn't strike a deep chord with audiences isn't really his fault.

 

As for Keaton, well, I guess he was okay. I must be the only person who never thought he was all that great in the role. He made for a serviceable Bruce Wayne, but I don't feel he was a convincing Batman. The whole "put him in body armor with fake muscles" approach was started with Keaton because he didn't have the physique to be a superhero, and the precedent it set in Hollywood has been truly unfortunate, in my view.

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