Summary:
- Rumored DCU projects, including a possible Dark Nights: Metal spinoff, suggest a move towards a multiverse storyline.
- However, executing Dark Nights: Metal would require extensive setup and audience genre awareness to navigate its complexity and justify its budget.
Now, going by many rumors available online, here are some new projects that could be in the works for James Gunn’s DCU: some of the intellectual properties said to be making the cut into the official DCU ensemble are teams like the Justice League International,
The Terrifics, and the Justice League Dark. That then brought about, in the comics, the creation of the Terrifics, which were derived from the premise of exploring the Dark Multiverse, which is the premise of Dark Nights: Metals.
What these rumors have been saying is that after the work that James Gunn did on the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, he may feel inspired to do the same with the Dark Nights: Metal storyline of DC – see it through, from inception as the overarching narrative for the DCU.
Doing Dark Nights: Metal with James Gunn would need a lot of setup.
If rumors of projects to come in the DCU are to be believed, Dark Nights: Metal is a multi-year project, likely of the same caliber, if not more, than the MCU‘s Infinity Saga. Not that even that is a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, as James Gunn‘s DCU is, both intrinsically and extrinsically, not the MCU.
Dark Nights: Metal offers much more complex storytelling than other possible stories for the early DCU. That includes introducing the multiverse, which is a theme already in vogue for superhero stories, and delving deep into the intricacies of a Dark Multiverse.
Further, having to manage the various darkened versions of Batman who are introduced within the story could potentially shroud the audience in confusion.
World-building elements, such as special metals that fuel the event, are interesting, but once again, they tend to distract Batman from building his own story within the Justice League framework.
The DCU might need audiences to have a better understanding of different genres.
Because it will be required of it, mostly James Gunn’s DCU will ask a lot of its audience: to be pretty well-versed in genre, for one; but how could it not—this has been quite a complex sprawl of a saga, much like Dark Nights: Metal is promising to be; to set all that groundwork that Gunn and his team are doing, and in an unbelievably dense and detailed manner.
The lucid budget for these movies can be justified if these movies convey the information to mainstream viewers in a way that they are not repulsed and do not alienate comic fans by the inundation of it.
The primary importance must be towards slowly building the universe, laying some establishment, and seeing to it that there is a pipeline that is stable, where this kind of storytelling may flow from. This is the line we shall toe towards the successful execution of Dark Nights: Metal in James Gunn’s DCU.
