“Risks alienating audience members who can’t find a way into the story.”

People of the internet, this is for you.

For anyone who can’t “find a way into” an animated movie about a girl who turns into a red panda......

There were flashers in that movie?

I didn’t think Matt Furie was French.

It’s such a stupid argument. It was like those pricks who were on here a few years ago furiously wanking on about how they hate Watchmen, not for anything in it but because they felt it inspired generations of other comics which were too grim for their precious tastes. And that’s fine, but how does that make Watchmen…

When it was first announced that DC was going to do a shared universe, but that Bale’s Batman wouldn’t be part of it, I assumed that was because the more grounded, “realistic” Nolan version wouldn’t fit in the brightly-colored, more upbeat world of the other superheroes. Little did I imagine that Snyder would take it…

You might be right in the sense that TDK’s success convinced the studio “dark” superhero movies could be successful, but the more important way in which TDK is responsible for the Snyderverse is that Nolan recruited Snyder for the Superman gig. That’s one of the things Nolan did with his post-TDK blank check.

As I say elsewhere, I think discussing the MCU as a completely ungrounded quip-fest does a disservice. Several of Iron Man’s major scenes involve the protagonist sitting in a reclined position, and there’s only 4 or 5 real action sequences (even if they are all fairly protracted), and it’s at its core a story about a…

It’s important to remember that The Dark Knight actually IS fun. It doesn’t get bogged down in portentious mythology, and it doesn’t wallow in darkness (at least not tonally). The Joker does a LOT of stuff in bright saturated daylight in this movie, and he’s genuinely funny, even in some of the film’s most tonally…

Seeing the squid monster in the Watchmen series, and The Suicide Squad trailer will remind of the infinite truth of Snyder:
He will never figure that shit out, so he just shows his egotism through his characters, and Superheroes are meant to rise above such selfish qualities.

Yeah, I’m surprised this didn’t discuss the obvious effect it had on Man of Steel, BvS, etc. DC saw the profit and audience reception to The Dark Night and took the wrong lesson from it:

No, they were getting ready to reboot Star Trek as Phase II, a sci-fi TV show with most of the original cast (but not Nimoy). They bumped it to theatrical because of the Star Wars success and all the studios rushing to cash in with sci-fi movies (see Alien, Black Hole, etc)

Dumb take. For multiple reasons, many of them already expressed here (e.g. there is no shortage of non-grimdark, massively successful comic book movies, including dozens of MCU ones, and a handful of DC ones as well).

DC’s only successful superhero movies post-1989 were Batman films. DC wanted to make more Batman films, so they hired Snyder who made a huge hit out of 300 to do Watchmen, they watched TDK blow up, then Watchmen which was far more afield do alright so they handed him the reins.

To be fair, without Star Wars, we would never have gotten the Star Trek revival that was launched with TMP.

You’re correct about a different ending to the apartment scene. The novelization, based on an earlier film draft, has Joker kidnapping Vicki, Wayne changing to Batman in his limo, and Batman pursuing Joker on horseback through the 200th Anniversary celebration.

A magazine article I read at the time said that they did…

Of course!  And two copies each of the polybagged X-Cutioners Song series so I could leave one in the bag and read one!

The guys who who wrote this show don’t know squat.