You don’t often see interviews with Gregory Noveck, DC’s man in Hollywood, but voices from Krypton has one in which he talks about how DC works with studios and filmmakers to make various DC-based films:
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Do you guys ever throw up red flags when something doesn’t seem right? I’m not sure what your feeling was about Superman Returns. My feeling has been that it was good, but it should have been great.
GREGORY NOVECK: If they wanted to make Superman’s cape blue, for example, we’d say, “You can’t do that.” If they wanted it where Clark Kent never wears glasses, that’s an issue. If the relationship between Lois and Clark felt false, we could comment on that. It’s not that we can’t say, “Hey, could there be more action in this movie?” We can, but it’s not really our call, it’s up to the filmmaker. The thing about Superman Returns is that at the end of the day it’s a recognizable Superman and a recognizable Superman movie. There’s nothing in the movie except where maybe the strictest fans would say, “Superman would never do that.” If you’d seen the previous iterations of the script, from my standpoint we were really successful. Is it at the same level of movie that Batman Begins was? Probably not, but it’s a different animal, yet both of those are recognizable as those characters.
Don’t you mean to say how DC works with ONE studio and not studios? DC is tied to Warners – their parent company – which also controls Warner Animation and Warner Premiere (as well as CW). There’s little to no chance DC could farm out characters to other studios in the manner Marvel has done (i.e. Sony, Lionsgate) and strike the best deals, getting more movies and TV out into the market.
This is a point several business analysts have pointed out as a serious “weakness” on DC’s part in comparison to Marvel. It would be very interesting to see if DC could raise private capital and produce their own movies the way Marvel has…