Good news, guys: Warner Bros. says it has a ten-year plan for its library of DC Comics characters.
The bad news: They waited until now to have a ten-year plan for the DC library?!?
Either way, there is clearly a great deal of upheaval going on behind the scenes of Warners these days since the company merged with Discovery, who brought in a new team of executives. The combined company has canceled at least one major DC project, an HBO Max Batgirl movie, leaving fans wondering which previously announced films and shows will still get made, and which will wind up in the Hollywood Phantom Zone.
We won’t know for sure for a while. But a new article on Warners and DC in The Hollywood Reporter suggests there could be more changes ahead for the company’s release calendar. They note that “development has slowed” on several previously announced projects, like the Static Shock movie and J.J. Abrams and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Superman.
A lot seems to hinge on the status of Walter Hamada, the man who had been in charge of Warners’ DC slate before the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. When WBD shelved Batgirl, Hamada reportedly “nearly exited” the company, and for the moment has only agreed to stay through the release of Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam.
If Hamada leaves, that could alter plans further. But his ideas for DC were apparently massive. Per the report:
Hamada’s plans were said to have included a Crisis on Infinite Earths event, a take on the seminal DC Comics story that was adapted for TV on The CW. Rumors circulated about introducing the Secret Six, a villain team that in the comics have been Suicide Squad antagonists.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is basically DC’s signature crossover series, which featured every hero from the company’s history and smooshed together all o the company’s various alternate realities into a single new continuity. The book came out in the 1980s and every few years since then, DC has done a variation on it. (In fact, right now they’re publishing a book called Dark Crisis.) Essentially, if DC really wanted to challenge Marvel and something like Avengers: Endgame in a serious way, they would need to make a Crisis on Infinite Earths movie.
But will it happen? At this point, who knows? At the very least, we won’t have a clue until at least Black Adam opens in theaters, which happens on October 21.
