There’s a sense of optimism surrounding the new DCU that Superman will inaugurate this summer. James Gunn’s reboot universe already has some question marks, but surely anything would be an improvement over the old DCEU — the so-called Snyderverse was revered by hardcore fans, but to the rest of us, it was an increasingly dull slog through pointlessly grim tales.
But we haven’t come here to bury the Snyderverse. We haven’t come to praise it, either, God no, but we can acknowledge its relative competence. The Snyderverse had a vision, even if that vision was fueled by Monster energy drinks and malaise. The same cannot be said for many of the comic book movies that preceded it in the years before Marvel’s interconnected adventures remade the genre, because as messy as DC’s first shared universe was, it was still a huge step up from the company’s previous strategy of releasing random and usually awful standalone films.
