DCEU Retrospective: Final Look
The DCEU has been an unquestionable disaster thus far. It seems that after the years they might have finally figured out how to make a halfway decent movie but I’m honestly not holding up hopes for how they will move forward.
Just like with my MCU retrospectives, I’ve been ranking the movies in the DCEU as I had watched them. Movies were ranked 1 to 10 on five criteria: Acting, the Quality of the Villain, Action, VFX, and the Overall Story Quality. The averages of these scores were taken and an overall rank of the movies was made. Below are how I broke down each of the movies in chronological order.
In general, the DCEU fared much worse than the MCU. The DC movies in all categories scored on average lower than the MCU. Honestly a big reason why there’s such a large discrepancy between the two studios comes down to Suicide Squad. With it’s laughably miserable score it brought down the overall average.
Putting them in descending order this is my personal ranking of the movies.
Strangely enough, like with the Marvel movies, the movie that I ranked the highest in these re-watches was not my personal favorite so far. Of all of the DCEU movies to date, Shazam! has been my favorite of the lot. I felt that Shazam! was just overall a lot of fun and a breath of fresh air compared to the early DCEU shit-show.
And again, like with the MCU stuff, I did rank these movies before I started this re-watch and, unsurprisingly to me, not much changed on this list.
The only change was Wonder Woman dropping a few places and Birds of Prey taking its place on the top of the list.
On the whole I have to applaud the DCEU for being a bit more experimental at times than the MCU. Despite that, most of these experiments just didn’t work. The biggest struggle for DC thus far has been the writing and VFX. Disastrous Justice League de-mustaching aside, the VFX in DC movies has been awful even when held against early 2000s CGI standards. Combine that with questionable at best and laughably cringey at worst writing and this whole enterprise has just been one disappointment after another, at least until Aquaman.
Notably Wonder Woman was great, especially compared to the dreck that had been shat out by the studio around it. But upon re-watch I feel that Wonder Woman doesn’t hold up quite as well as the newer DC movies. It’s still a good movie (albeit with a slightly disappointing ending) but I feel that it was considered so great because everything else we had received from the studio before that was so saddening.
DC seems to have finally found their footing lately but I’m afraid it’s a matter of far too little, far too late. People have seriously lost faith in their movies and with their on-and-off decision to disconnect their movies from a single universe the studio has only further muddied the waters by creating a timeline that you need a PhD in Quantum Mechanics to fully understand. They’ve said that they intend to reset things with their solo Flash movie that will adapt the Flashpoint storyline but we’ll see what further chaos that creates.