Man of Steel 2 will make a villain of Superman or Batman Jul 22nd 2013, 10:32
Zack Snyder and David Goyer will have to tread carefully to keep fans hooked, but this could see the genre go stratospheric
Make no mistake: Warner Bros has pulled off a huge coup with its announcement at this weekend's Comic-Con that the next Man of Steel movie will feature Superman battling Batman. Even with rival studio Marvel using San Diego's annual fanboy Mecca to reveal the title (and antagonist) of the next Avengers film, it is the news that Kal-El and the caped crusader will be squaring off that has caught the imagination of public and media alike. That's some feat when you consider that Marvel's comic book ensemble was by far the biggest film of 2012 at the global box office, while Man of Steel hasn't yet passed the haul taken by the fourth Spider-Man movie and got a lukewarm thumbs up from critics.
Director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S Goyer now face the daunting task of transforming what on paper sounds like a dream superhero smackdown into a movie that not only continues telling the story of the new Superman but delivers a fresh Batman capable of spinning off into his own adventures AND joining Warner's promised Justice League movie (which will unite the pair with Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern).
Any Superman v Batman story must be handled extremely carefully, not least because of the disparity between the two superheroes' abilities. The Dark Knight might be the more popular cinematic superhero in these more cynical times, but Bruce Wayne cannot hold a candle to the last son of Krypton when it comes to actual superpowers. While Batman has all the wealth of Wayne's billions to help him fight crime, Superman is a godlike creature from another planet whose physical stature is exaggerated a thousand times in Earth's environment. He can fly, is virtually invulnerable, has powerful heat vision and can move faster than sound. A straight fight between the pair would be like a face-off between and elephant and a gnat.
In the comic books where the two characters have battled it out, writers have often imagined a scenario where Wayne used his fortune to get hold of some Kryptonite, Superman's only real weakness. In perhaps the pair's most famous battle, in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Superman even gets blown up with a nuclear weapon – yet still somehow comes out just about on top.
Snyder has hinted that he will use the antipathy between the pair in Miller's comic as the basis for his new film. The potential problem here is that the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns veers into antihero territory in a way that Christopher Nolan's big screen iteration never did. In his 1986 limited series, Miller brilliantly contrasts a shallow and self-centred, increasingly wrinkly and jaded caped crusader with a Kal-El who remains youthful, noble and good-hearted – yet as boring as dry toast for dinner. Snyder and his team will need to tread a more considered path, giving the spat between the pair enough spiky venom to make for fun viewing without belittling either. Batman, in particular, needs to maintain the vital humanity with which Nolan imbued Christian Bale's version if audiences are to care about his future battles to save Gotham. Moreover, these two are going to have to kiss and make up if Warner's plan for a Justice League movie in 2017 is to come to fruition.
Nevertheless, the studio's decision to start its drive towards an Avengers-like ensemble superhero movie by introducing a new Batman into the Man of Steel universe makes a lot of sense. The other members of the Justice League remain superpowered twinkles in the studio's eye (bar The Green Lantern, who's more of an unattractive snot-like stain after the debacle of Martin Campbell's 2011 non-event). Warner needs at least one film to begin introducing its lineup of masked crime fighters – and doing it this way avoids any accusation that the studio has simply purloined Marvel's hugely successful blueprint (which involved giving each hero his own movie before teaming them up in The Avengers).
Might we also hear rumblings of other members of the team? There are rumours of a Flash film sometime before Justice League arrives, and Superman is in the perfect position to investigate the appearance of other super-powered types via his alter ego Clark Kent's new position as a Daily Planet reporter. Imagine if Wonder Woman et al began popping up on his journalistic radar one by one …
It looks like Nolan will have very little involvement in Man of Steel 2, which is probably a good thing bearing in mind his attachment to the most recent screen incarnation of Batman. But Warner will be throwing everything else in its coffers at the new movie. This weekend's Comic-Con proved that superhero flicks are here to stay, and yet the stakes rise all the time. Superman v Batman has the chance to be the genre's most successful film yet, and might even challenge the likes of Avatar for box office "pow" if Snyder gets it right. In many ways it is too big to fail. In years to come we could be talking about this film as the moment the genre went truly stratospheric – or faced its very own Kryptonite.
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