The '70s comic line that nearly destroyed the company. The video game that ruined Superman.
And the Justice League movie that's even worse than the one you're thinking of.
What went wrong with these astounding DC failures? Keep watching to find out.
For comic books, the 1970s brought with it a maturation in both content and storytelling
that drove sales wild. No longer intended only for children, those who grew up reading
comics found they could still enjoy them while simultaneously introducing them to their own kids.
With this success came expansion, but DC's attempt to capitalize and finally
eclipse their chief rival, Marvel Comics, nearly destroyed the company.
In 1978, the company announced DC EXPLOSION!, a marketing and publishing campaign that sought to
increase their market share by publishing more ongoing series. The effort had actually begun
three years earlier; from 1975 to 1978, DC Comics added 34 new titles to their line of comics.
However, two horrific winters back-to-back in 1977 and 1978 devastated supply lines, decimated sales,
and further exacerbated already-rising production costs. DC Comics was forced to
cancel over thirty of their ongoing series and bin nearly a dozen more still in production.
Nearly bankrupt, DC was also forced to lay off a percentage of its staff.
When all was said and done, their "Explosion" of new titles in 1978 ultimately became anything but,
giving rise to the name this event is still known as to this day: "The DC Implosion."
Joss Whedon's live action Justice League film was divisive to say the least,
but it was a vast improvement upon the closest thing it had to a precursor:
CBS's 1997 made-for-television Justice League of America movie. It was meant to act as a pilot
for a full television series, but the movie's abysmal quality ensured that would never happen.
This version of the superhero team included the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, Martian Manhunter,
Fire, and Ice. Their uniforms look like cheap, store-bought Halloween costumes,
and though the story ostensibly centers around the team's fight against
a supervillain named "Weather Wizard," the movie spends most of its time pretending to
be a standard '90s sitcom — one that just happens to feature superheroes.
"Did you at least get him to fix the TV?"
"Barry's had a lot on his mind lately. He'll get a place as soon as he finds a job."
The team all live together in the same building, and the majority of
its runtime is devoted to their attempts to navigate their underwhelming personal lives
as they fail at both life and love. The movie also frequently cuts away from whatever is happening on
screen to show random interviews with the heroes in their civilian identities, a quirk that would
later be vastly improved upon by The Office. All in all? This is hardly DC's finest hour.
In 1999, video game developer Titus Interactive released Superman:
The New Superman Adventures for the Nintendo 64.
Despite the wordy, redundant title, the game is more commonly known as either Superman 64 — or
"the worst video game ever made." Gamespot gave the game a 1.3 out of 10 and said that:
"It serves no purpose other than to firmly establish the bottom of the barrel."
IGN's review, meanwhile, flat out told its readers:
"Do not buy this piece of garbage."
The game was broken from the ground up. The controls were unintuitive,
difficult to handle, and often simply didn't work, making the harshly-timed flying sequences
almost impossible to navigate. It was also plagued with bugs that would commonly result in lagging,
stuttering frame rates. The graphics, which were bad even for the time,
often made it impossible to see thanks to the thick fog that constantly surrounds the player.
Basically, even if the game did somehow work properly,
players still had to fly blind with a character they could barely control in a timed race that
had to be executed perfectly in order to win. And that was just the first level.
In 2004, Halle Berry became Catwoman in theaters across the world — except for one problem:
she wasn't anything like the character fans had been reading about in comic books since 1940.
This wasn't Selina Kyle; it was an original character named Patience Phillips.
She wasn't a fiercely independent career criminal or cat burglar; she was a shy,
timid fashion designer who discovers a dangerous plot to release a deadly skin cream.
Worse still, Patience shares none of her inspiration's anti-hero qualities and instead
becomes a straightforward hero in one of the most poorly designed costumes to ever plague the silver
screen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie earned a 9% Tomatometer and a Razzie "award," to boot.
"It's overtime!"
If there's a silver lining to how divisive and controversial nearly
every single DCEU film has been so far, it's that previous entries like
Catwoman are drifting further and further back into the history books.
To say that 2011's Green Lantern was a mess is a bit of an understatement.
With the MCU still fresh on the block, the movie was meant to serve as the foundation
for both its own trilogy and an expanded DC cinematic universe. It was a lot to ask of
a single film with an unproven character — and with a rotten, 26% Tomatometer and a box office
total that came less than halfway to breaking even, it's safe to say it failed spectacularly.
Green Lantern didn't so much tell a story or roll out a plot as much as it delivered nearly
two hours of exposition. This ensured that anybody who stayed awake throughout the whole film had a
solid primer for a hero that wouldn't be returning to the silver screen anytime soon. Unfortunately,
even an impressive cast wasn't strong enough to outweigh the badly-designed
CGI Green Lantern uniform or the hungry, evil space cloud that served as its main villain.
More than a decade later, Green Lantern is primarily remembered for two things:
for being the set where celebrity super-couple Reynolds and Blake Lively fell for each other,
and for being roundly mocked by the Deadpool movies.
In 2006, Snowblind Studios released Justice League Heroes for the Xbox and Playstation 2.
It was the team's first full, dedicated modern video game,
and it was fairly well-received. Then, in 2009, Global VR tried to capitalize on that success
by releasing a horrendous arcade cabinet game titled Justice League: Heroes United.
This was a two-player, sequential hallway brawler populated with character models that
looked more like oversaturated blobs. Though the controls for the game were a nightmare,
the most frustrating element may have been its staggeringly frustrating third-person camera.
Combined, these elements made playing the game a frustrating, unrewarding experience — one
that often left players unable to actually hit any of the game's enemies. Thankfully,
the company's distribution model was just as decrepit as their gameplay experience,
and very few of the cabinets ever actually made their way to arcades.
When Christopher Reeve's first Superman film came out in 1978, it was a sensation unto itself. Even
to this day, it is held up as one of the best examples of a superhero origin story.
The sequel, Superman II was also a hit, but the third film in the series, Superman III,
was received quite poorly. Not wanting to end the series on a low note, Reeve agreed to do a
fourth film — but not before being promised more creative control over its story and direction.
Inspired by breakdowns in disarmament talks at the time, Reeve wanted to do a story revolving
around the nuclear arms race. Thanks to difficulties with multiple directors,
however, as well as a budget that was suddenly cut in half right before production began,
the movie that released in theaters was nothing like the one he had envisioned.
In short, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was a mess. The plot was nonsensical,
the effects were terrible, and the box office revenue was barely enough to cover its expenses,
let alone make a profit. This film killed Superman movies for decades,
and though fans today might be more preoccupied by Zack Snyder's dour take on the Man of Steel,
this unfortunate mistake should never be forgotten.
Batman & Robin is not a good film. In fact, it killed Batman films for nearly a decade,
and the director, Joel Schumacher, was still apologizing for it decades later.
"Seven million… never leave the cave without it."
This movie was almost unbelievably campy, featured strange versions of too many characters,
and was nearly universally panned by critics and fans alike. Ice machines are inexplicably powered
by diamonds, thin plastic lip coverings are enough to stop the world's deadliest neurotoxins,
and the constant changes in both costume and transportation
were included for no other reason than to sell additional merchandise.
The movie was a meager success at the box office, but it was clear that no one wanted more of this
version of Batman. Still, time has helped this particular wound sting less and less.
Debates over more recent Batmen have helped many fans forget Batman & Robin, and "so bad
it's good" movie-watching culture has helped the rest laugh along — if only to keep from crying.
In 2007, DC Comics decided to release a Wonder Woman-centric comic book crossover event titled
Wonder Woman: Amazons Attack. The story revolves around the ancient Amazons of Themyscira attacking
the rest of the world. It turns out to be the plot of a shapeshifting sorceress named Circe
who has manipulated the Amazonians' leader and queen, Hippolyta, but the war rages nevertheless.
There were a few key problems with this story, however. To start with,
it barely featured Wonder Woman at all. As if that wasn't enough, the miniseries was a direct
tie-in to one of the most infamous comic books that DC Comics has ever published: Countdown to
Final Crisis. One of the series' few strengths was to show the Amazons utilizing all kinds
of creatures from Greek Mythology as magic war machines, but the cool factor is pretty thoroughly
nullified by the fact that the attacking Amazonian soldiers openly kill children in
the streets. It's not a particularly heroic moment for the nation that gave the world Wonder Woman.
Surprisingly, the horror story that is All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder was somehow
created by two of the most beloved Batman creators of all time. Jim Lee's art is famous across the
comic book industry for its stellar quality, and Frank Miller's earlier Batman stories are
considered two of the best ever written. Both Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns
helped transform the character into the brutal knight of vengeance that fans know today,
but All-Star takes that trend to a painful, regrettable extreme.
This version of Batman is practically psychotic. He literally kidnaps Dick Grayson,
forces the child to become Robin, and traps him inside the Batcave with nothing to eat but rats.
If that wasn't bad enough, he's also a sadistic monster who spends the vast
majority of his inner monologues detailing the gruesome ways he's beaten and crippled
Gotham's many criminals. And that's all on top of the series' cringe-worthy dialogue,
mind-numbing plot, and extraordinarily problematic presentation of its few female characters.
It's easily Batman's worst story ever,
and one that both DC Comics and its readers wish they could forget.
Thankfully, time has helped this story fade into relative obscurity. May it forever stay there.
Josh Brolin is famous among fans of superhero cinema for his stellar performances as Thanos,
the arch-villain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's ground-breaking "Infinity Saga."
Before he wore that iconic purple chin, however,
he sported a half-burned face as Jonah Hex in the 2010 movie of the same name.
In the comics, Jonah Hex is DC's most popular Western-themed character and thrives in stories
set within that genre. But this movie was a long, long way from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Jonah Hex was a commercial and critical failure of the highest order. It made back only one-fourth of
its $47 million dollar budget and earned a 12% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audience
receptions weren't much better due to its horrific pacing and the strange, unnecessary changes
it made to the character and his franchise. Instead of being a gritty, wild-West ranger, this
version of Jonah Hex had magic powers that allowed him to temporarily raise people from the dead.
And, instead of featuring in stories revolving around the dangers of the far-flung frontier, this
plot revolved around a secret, Confederate plot to destroy all of Washington DC with a giant cannon.
At the end, the president tries to make Hex the "Sheriff of the United States."
And that alone sums up Jonah Hex rather perfectly.
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