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I’ve written about the elusive right tone for the DCU. I've written about the 2 core themes that undergird every DC character, derived from the fundamental reason why the DC universe exists at all.So let's talk, finally, about what the stories could be.This is a thought experiment, as if the DCEU had never happened. So roll back your clocks with me, kids, to a time when Warner Brothers had just closed the book on The Dark Knight trilogy, and Thanos was little more than a gleam in Kevin Fiege's eye. Man of Steel doesn't exist. We are building something new. That said, I'm looking with 20/20 hindsight — the MCU is still going to happen more or less as it did, and I want my DCU to stand out against the competition. So “Like Infinity War, but with Darkseid!” is not a valid approach to Justice League for me, even if it'd be awesome. We must do it differently.My DCU is a mad and heightened world of sci-fi possibility. Our most glorious and dangerous futures are coming true. Scientists cracking infinite energy sources, extra dimensions, mutagenic engineering, advanced AI, nanotechnology, all the good stuff. It’s a pre-singularity world built on super-science, full of larger-than-life stranger-than-real cities home to monsters and shadow cabals chasing implacable forces, all coveted by megalomaniacs, tyrants and rogue geniuses.When you have a world as fabulously unreal as the DCU, you need explorers and detectives and outsiders who share the audience’s desire to understand it. This is why sci-fi/fantasy pairs so deliciously with noir and “journey home" stories — the whole point becomes to unravel the world-building. So we, as strangers to the DCU, need our Alice, our Dorothy, our Neo, our Marty McFly, our Dave Bowman. We need our audience surrogate, eyes through which to discover the big, bold concepts and allegories. Thankfully, DC's stories have always come pre-loaded with these characters! To wit:Robin would let an audience see Batman with fresh eyes. There’s no need to do Batman’s origin. One of the best choices the DCEU made was an already-established Batman. They just overshot the mark by hiding his best stories in the character's past. My conjecture is you CAN tell a tale which wrestles with the darkness of being Batman, doesn't re-tread well-worn ground, but still leaves room to develop the mythos with a young Batman — you do so by telling the one story no piece of media outside the comics has ever gotten right (tho the Animated Series flashbacks were spectacular): The origin of Robin. And make Robin a legit 10-to-12 year old who will grow with the entire DC franchise (not unlike what Marvel's doing with Spider-Man). Anchor this universe in Dick Grayson. Tell a Batman story from Robin's POV. Make it a gothic, crack'd mirror version of a buddy picture, like Lethal Weapon or 48 Hours filtered through Batman: Dark Victory (the way The Dark Knight was Heat remixed with The Long Halloween). Batman is Riggs, Grayson's a much younger Murtaugh. In their duality, we can wrestle with the obligatory Batman trope of dead parents in fresher ways. Batman and Robin surprise each other AND the audience. We tell a story about rebuilding family, and combining the will to be better with the perspective to know what “better" means. Take some cues from the less-insane parts of Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin (which really is the ultimate Robin story for people who hate the concept of Robin)! Show us a young and hungry Batman, a bullet of rage barely aimed, overly consumed with his mission, gazing too long into the abyss. Give us Robin the way Bill Finger intended, as the relatable touchstone kid gazing dubiously into the life of this reclusive billionaire ninja. In the way Batman trains Robin, we see Bruce’s psychosis and Dick's resolve to not end up like him; we get all the great “building Batman" moments fans love, while eating our cake too with a fully-formed Batman pushing his vampire shtick a step too far. The whole thing obliquely takes place in a post-Dark Knight world, the way Incredible Hulk obliquely took place after Ang Lee's Hulk: the mobs have been broken by the freaks, Batman's allies are in short supply, Commissioner Gordon still trusts him, but their dance must be done carefully. The Joker is in Arkham (if referenced at all), and Batman is more or less overwhelmed by the encroaching insanity of this city. I don't know exactly who the villains should be. Someone needs to kill the Graysons. Someone needs to reflect back to Batman the danger of losing yourself to a vendetta. And someone needs to reflect the stakes of this out-of-control sci-fi world. Mr. Freeze or Clayface are obvious choices, Black Mask is a constant fanboy refrain, but my gut pushes me toward Dr. Hugo Strange and his monster men (perhaps including Clayface and Man-Bat?). Give Batman a mad scientist villain, we've yet to see it onscreen. Pair Strange with The Black Hand or The Court of Owls. These aristocratic secret societies fit our over-the-top tone, plus you have Grayson there to call attention to how blurry the line is between this cabal of rich, authoritarian weirdos and Batman himself. Bruce will need to re-center himself, redefine his principles, so as not to fall off that edge. Plus, the Owls do such a great job of pushing Gotham as a character, which I love. I envision Gotham as the ultimate libertarian city - huge and sprawling and unchecked, with centuries of proud, defiant history — robber-barons and self-made-men carving out destinies at the expense of the environment, politics and the working class. A city that was vehemently anti-slavery before it was vehemently anti-union, and has always been anti-tax. A place of contradictions, Vegas or New Orleans on the East Coast with the grime and sprawl of 70s New York. A town committed to giving everyone an equal chance to be victims. Chemicals and manufacturing are the city’s two biggest industries, and the whole populace is a little bit touched in the head by what’s in the air. But Gotham brings in the money. Be you an aristocrat, a crime lord, a longshoreman, or a henchman, there’s nowhere to earn like Gotham City. I digress. Whatever nemesis we choose for our heroes, the important thing is to tell a complete story of Batman and Robin finding the most unexpected salvation in each other. That immediately differentiates this version from other Batmen. Then, in whatever your post-credits tag might be: “Isn't tonight a school night?” from the man in the bright red cape. You could kick off the whole franchise with this film, but if I’m honest, I think it’s THIRD to the plate.You should start the franchise with a palate cleanser. Make what seems to be an experimental, standalone science fiction film. To the public at large, we say we're testing the waters of lesser-known DC properties, attempting to do something truly different in the wake of the Avengers juggernaut. Our creative team insists that building a universe is the last thing on our minds. We just want to make something great and strange and surprising. That film is The Unknown. It's an adaptation of Challengers of the Unknown. It will covertly lay the groundwork for everything. As pre-production commences, intriguing details would leak. Crazy casting rumors. This character, really? That character, no! What does any of this have do with Challengers of the Unknown? The pieces would reveal themselves slowly, and only when the first trailer hit would the scope of what we're doing be revealed. No one will be ready for it. This Challengers movie is a Trojan Horse...For the Secret History of the DC Universe. The Challengers are there to excavate it, like the Planetary team from Warren Ellis' eponymous masterpiece. The Unknown would be an Inception-like series of capers and escapes, executed by the Challengers, as the forces of King Faraday, a young Amanda Waller, the Global Peace Agency and ultimately the One Man Army Corps himself Buddy Blank close in – all in pursuit of the story's MacGuffin: Adam Strange. The Unknown opens in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert, in that fateful year 1986. Ace, Prof, Rocky, Red and newest recruit (and POV character!) June Robbins are already a team. And they are waiting for the Zeta Beam – a source of immense and dangerous power – to materialize. With it comes the supposedly-insane Adam Strange. It's another assignment from Faraday, this old-school government spook who hires the Challengers to take on missions from which they might not come back. But when Strange tries to escape their custody, when he babbles wild tales of an interplanetary empire, and bouncing through time in dilated intervals since the 1930s, all to return to his one true love, the Challs question the facts Faraday gave them. Something smells fishy. The GPA's interest in the Zeta Beam is about more than free energy – it's about pre-emptive strikes and the potential for conquest. And so the chase begins – the Challs resolve to get Strange to the next Zeta Beam transport, which means going AWOL and evading the noose of government black ops. Throughout, there's a question of whether Strange is a crazy man whose brain is broken by power, or if Rann is real. And ultimately, the team that's living on borrowed time has to save not one but two people – Adam Strange, and their enemy Buddy Blank, the unwitting super-soldier whose bizarre transformation hints at much darker plans than the Challs ever imagined. Infused with heaping helpings of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, and with cameo appearances by everyone from Professor Erdel to Ted Knight’s gravity rod to archaeologists Kent and Inza Nelson to a young Martin Jordan, this film is the Justice Society movie no one knew they wanted. It's a wild mash-up of Minority Report, Rogue One and Midnight Special, with this disavowed team on the run from insidious forces, and only a ragtag network of underground adventurers from across the proto-DCU to lean on. In the end, Faraday will have a change of heart over the whole affair, and realize he is a man trying to control that which is beyond him. Waller will have no such awakening – and this story sets her on a path that we'll revisit again, 30 years into her future. Prof and June will be vaporized in each other's arms, lost souls who managed to find something worth fighting for. And their sacrifice will see Adam Strange able to hop the next Zeta Beam to Alanna – as they die, the Challs catch a glimpse of another world more beautiful than they ever imagined. ALL the characters will realize how tenuous a grasp they have on this new future. It demands a new kind of hero entirely. And all the brave men and women who survive this film will become the mentors to that next generation. BUT WAIT. The piece de resistance. Post credits: Our first concrete glimpse of the planet Rann. Gorgeous and hyperreal, like something out of Luc Besson's Valerian. Adam and Alanna, entwined post-coitus. They gaze, contented, into an alien sky. The audience still believes this to be a surprising yet standalone film. Until Adam asks about a faint red nebula. Alanna tells him it's new — the fresh remains of an exploded star that their ancient religion said was home to the gods themselves. They called it Rao.Lois Lane is the prototype for every other DC audience surrogate. More than that, she and Superman are the apotheosis of everything the DCU is about. Lois is the ultimate human seeker, Superman the ultimate embodiment of science-fictional transcendence. With our stealth reveal of the universe done in The Unknown, we now make the only film that deserves to launch the DCU: SUPERMAN. Superman’s origin story is not the destruction of Krypton, and only tangentially his time on the farm. His true origin is the love story between him and Lois. It should be told sumptuously. Close Encounters meets The Incredibles meets The English Patient or Sense and Sensibility or even The Constant Gardener in how raw, impossible and NECESSARY their love is. In each other, they see a perfection that hard-bitten experience tells them can’t be real. In each other, they see the hope of what humanity could be. (And by dog, if Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener isn’t a template for Lois, I don’t know who is.) As in those epic romances, it’s the state of the world, their obligations to it and their lived experiences that conspire to keep them apart. Make no mistake, while a love story lives at its core, this is not a stuffy drama. This is apex-Superman, grand and sly and winking and fast and concerned with no less than the trajectory of all humankind. The themes are about how humans can and will save humans. I won’t say much more because I will write this movie and it will be the ultimate Superman origin story. Suffice to say the villains are Brainiac (finally) and Luthor, the scope is global, and we directly address the idea of a world on the precipice of great or terrible things. Forgetting whatever else happens in the DC franchise, Superman will be a trilogy - movie 1 about a god with the will to become a man, where Superman saves the world. Movie 2 about a man with the will to become a god (Gog), and Superman saves the timestream. And movie 3 about the path for all men to become gods, where Superman saves all of creation, with moments ripped from Grant Morrison’s World War III, Final Crisis and All-Star Superman. Superman needs a movie trilogy that treats him as a humanistic ur-myth; I’d almost say this is the primary reason to launch the DC franchise at all. It is only fitting that his story is the wellspring from which all others emerge. The DCEU got that right.At this point, we'd have 3 films under our belt: The Unknown, Superman, and Batman and Robin. We’d have teased the first encounter between Batman and Superman. It would be damn near impossible not to do Batman v Superman (or if the studio wasn't so insistent, some variation on World's Finest, which is an utterly preposterous name for a movie). And if you do World's Finest, it would be criminal not to introduce Wonder Woman. So as far as it goes, the DCEU’s structure was kind of inexorable. That said, there's two parallel conversations to be had: 1.) What would an ideal World's Finest movie look like? And 2.) What's an entirely better way to go?Let's start with a better way to go. I have no interest in “Phases.” Given that Avengers already exists, let's NOT plan to build up to a new Justice League every few years, with multiple franchise sequels in between. Sure, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman could get their trilogies (or even better, each a part-2 followed by a mutual part-3 in the form of Justice League). But otherwise, I would treat every film as a one-off. You better tell the best, most vital story you can in Part 1. If that means skipping an origin, do it. If the coolest story you can think of involves a hero going bad then redeeming himself, figure out how to condense. Or you better have the patience to let him become the villain of another character's film. There will be no “mini-builds" to the more important team-up chapters. Say we want to make a second Green Lantern movie? We're either making Green Lantern Corps or we're making Blackest Night (and calling it that), not Green Lantern 2. After Teen Titans, you're getting Titans or you're getting Outsiders. Or maybe you're getting Nightwing guest-starring half the Titans. You may think this is a semantic argument, but it's really not…This is foundational thinking. There will be no “continuing adventures,” unless a writer can figure out a way to change the dynamic so fundamentally that we're making a totally new film. Our whole storyworld bucks against stasis, it is always moving forward, it embodies the very ethos our stories embrace: dynamic, dangerous futurism. The amount of political maneuvering this would take in WB studio halls is so daunting I can all but assure you it'd never happen (name value is half their game, they want to slap a successful title on as many movies as possible). But it's what I'd want to do. I would save the formation of the Justice League for as long as humanly possible. In the long road there, we’d actually be telling 3 parallel macro stories across multiple films that all slowly but surely converge:Noir (Mystery) - Street-level heroes, with a punk-pop, over-the-top aesthetic in the vein of John Wick or Nicolas Winding Refn, seasoned with a sprinkle of old school kung fu grindhouse. Begun with Batman, extends into the likes of The Question, Starman (inspired by James Robinson’s series), Shade and Black Canary. Seekers in the dark underbelly of our sci-fi society. These heroes chase dirty dealings, conspiracies and increasingly monstrous criminals, eventually revealing the existence of The Evil Factory, run by Simyan and Mokkari, buried deep under the streets of Gotham.Sci-Fi (Exploration) - Silver Age frontiersmen of the strange, poking on the edges of reality with a grand, sober, location-driven approach in the vein of David Lean or Kubrick. Begun with Green Lantern, extends into the likes of The Atom, The Ray, Doom Patrol and Hawkworld. The heroes defend the most bleeding edge endeavors of human science, eventually discovering the likes of Metron and The Black Racer hiding between the seams of reality. Watching. Waiting.Metaphysical (Myth) - The nature of magic in our grand sci-fi milieu is the story of gods rising and falling. This is the Jack Kirby macro-story, an attempt to put comic book cosmology on screen in self-consistent, unadulterated glory. The right cinematic language may not even exist yet. The look and pace of the Wachowskis with the production design of Tarsem? Begun with Wonder Woman, continued in Shazam, Fate, The Forever People and even, yes, Sandman. Here we establish for our audience the concept of personification: beings of cosmological importance at once powered by the fundamental nature of all living things, and in a feedback loop, affecting that nature. This is the story that deals with the vacant heaven of the old gods…And eventually the horrific war of The New Gods.Superman is its own thing. Like The Unknown, it is an encapsulation of the entire universe, synthesizing all themes and storylines, arriving at the ultimate universe-threatening conclusion: Darkseid. The inevitability of Anti-Life. The hole in all things. The Final Crisis: for men to become gods, or to succumb to their lesser nature and submit. The Fifth World dawns in blood and fire.You're right to note some absences above. The Flash is not on this list for a few reasons. Chief among them is that The Flash's best story is Wally's story. Living up to a mentor who sacrificed himself to save the world. But second, the TV show has already said what needs to be said about Barry. Need we waste an entire Flash film telling a gratuitous story? Third, the whole concept of The Flash is self-reflexive — it’s a story about becoming a superhero. In the ways these stories deal with love and will, The Flash's best incarnation is about generational familial love and the will to take your place among the pantheon. You need everybody else first, then you get The Flash. If Flash appears in this DCU, it will be in the Justice League film — Part 1 of a 2-parter. Barry and Wally will function as the audience surrogate characters as our 3 macro-stories finally collide. Barry will die in Part 1. Wally will be a core part of whatever comes next for the DCU, alongside Nightwing, Kyle Rayner and Wonder Girl. Once Darkseid is defeated, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman will be retired - Superman to the heart of the sun, Batman scattered through time, Wonder Woman to tend a new Olympus. They will all reappear 10 years down the line to help battle a great evil, but we’ll go through a whole new set of stories dealing with The Multiverse before that Crisis hits. FWIW, the actors, however, get one more Pre-COIE, Post-Final-Crisis film: Portraying The Crime Syndicate! The first big challenge to their successors will literally be our core trinity.Green Lantern is an important piece of our story universe, so I’ll give it a deeper look. This film is set in Coast City, and on Mars. Coast City is like if Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Steve Jobs got together to build the town of their dreams. It’s Seattle with more minimalist architecture in sun-baked California, with bullet-tubes carrying engineers to launch pads, solar farms and experimental habitats right outside the city. In size, it’s almost quaint, compared to Metropolis or Gotham, but it feels like half the town is always under construction, always getting bigger. And it’s an industry town, with precious little else to do but literally shoot for the stars. The flat expanse of desert to the east is where all the most interesting stuff happens, despite the city’s name. Coast City's biggest economic driver is Queen Industries, the Tesla/SpaceX/Microsoft of the town, but there are others nipping at their heels. Sometime before our film begins, maverick CEO Oliver Queen has purchased faltering jet company Ferris Air, to repurpose it for his Mars Colony ambitions. Carol Ferris remains a managing partner, supported by chief engineer John Stewart and the Queen-mandated head of operations Ace Morgan (last seen played by a much younger actor in The Unknown). They all bristle against gruff commercial astronaut Hal Jordan. We’re remixing Hal. He’s Batfleck’s age here. He’s of an older generation (a Gen X-er, the Fight Club generation, the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world). He’s macho in a way that’s outdated. He’s resentful of the sci-fi future that’s crashing down around his head. Things were so much easier when he was flying planes that dropped bombs on the Middle East, even if he’s never quite shed his guilt. Complex dude. He's got no truck for the self-important “missions” of spoiled millennials with save-the-planet complexes like Oliver Queen. Hal doesn’t have to be played by Nathan Fillion, but imagine that. A little weathered, a little tired, just charming enough to get away with being a misanthropic dickhead. And with an arc which ultimately connects him to other people, an arc which teaches him to let go of the power he finds, not live up to it. When our Hal discovers the most powerful weapon in the universe buried in the sands of Mars, he at first sees himself as chosen, to make things right in his way - but the point of the film is that he’s not. This film’s twist on the twin themes of ‘love’ and ‘will’ sees the hero learn the will to relinquish control to the friends he loves. Hal Jordan finds the ring, but by Hal’s choice, John Stewart becomes Green Lantern. By the end, Hal rides off into the sunset with the woman he loves while John, the man with a real vision for the stars, flies off to usher Earth into the galactic community. The plot will live somewhere between New Frontier, Green Lantern: Earth One and the Justice League animated series opener. Abin Sur’s dead body is on Mars. So is evidence of a race of shapeshifters who torched their society then fled to Earth. Hal comes back slinging a ring to ferret out the secret invasion of White Martians, with help from all his friends (including the good Mr. Queen, who seems to have spent his free time training as a world class archer). And of course, in the post-credits scene, maybe we meet John Jones, a naively optimistic detective with a knack for knowing when someone's lying. He could go on to play a supporting role in films as varied as Black Canary, Doom Patrol or Fate.The DCEU’s Wonder Woman was sublime in concept, pretty good in execution. It gave her the stature and seniority the character deserves. I’m hard-pressed to beat the mythic awesomeness of drawing Diana out of Themyscira to fight in The Great War – modernity’s first brush with the old gods, and her first brush with the callousness of man. What we need to improve is the confused objective/status of the gods, and the half-assed (read: non-existent) reason she withdraws from mankind. In our DCU, we do what the DCEU was too feckless to do: Ares is dead, along with the rest of the gods and goddesses, Zeus included. The Amazons were not aware, or so it seems. This is a three-part reveal. Diana’s first task upon leaving Themyscira is to visit Olympus, a transdimensional plane accessed through some kickass CGI. She will petition the gods to spare humanity this war. But she finds Olympus in ruins. The wreckage of its own war, long since over. The Amazons have been living in their perfect protective bubble for thousands of years, while Heaven sat empty and civilization accelerated into a landslide of baser instincts. Diana will later learn Hippolyta knew this. She thinks her mother weak, for fearing the capabilities of men without protection from the gods. But finally, perhaps in a post-credits scene, we will learn it is not the barbarism of man that the Queen fears – but rather the rise of New Gods in the image of that barbarism. I see Diana leaving Earth on a quest to some astral realm when her origin is finished, in search of these emerging dieties. She will return to us bloodied and scared, alongside Barda and Scott Free, to begin the fortification of Earth. She is destined to be the general of the armies of man during the Final Crisis. But that comes later. For her origin story, our villain is the Psycho-Pirate. A man with a mask forged of Amazon relics, who feeds on the base emotions of humankind. Through him, we introduce the engine at the heart of the DCU’s magic, that personification feedback loop of godhood. We can even talk about how the energies of our cosmos recycle, from the First World of The Demiurge, to the Second World of Creation, to the Third World dieties like Zeus who shaped the primordeal forces of Earth. And now the Fourth World, powered by souls, by the emotions and choices of intelligent life. We might even tease and tie in The Green and The Red. Like I said, all magic begins here and ends at the Fourth World. This is a keystone to our universe and quite literally builds the foundation of its mythology.Finally, if a World's Finest film is really necessary, make it a bookend with The Unknown. It's The End of The Beginning. It wraps up what that film started. World's Finest could be the diamond lurking somewhere between Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, if you mashed up those films' themes with the DCAU's Cadmus arc. Batman and Superman play detective, to uncover Amanda Waller and her Checkmate organization making extra-legal, supra-national plays to control the dangerous ambitions of the world. A shadow government. There are two parallel stories here — a Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent story, and a Batman/Superman one. Kent and Wayne discover shared purpose in trying to discover how the revelations from their respective films have disappeared from public light. In Metropolis, Luthor cracked otherworldly secrets by connecting to Brainiac, while in Gotham, a shadowy cabal of billionaire masterminds was exposed. If Waller puts a lid on all of it, she preserves the stability of the status quo and gains a strategic advantage, all in the name of “for the people's own good.” Spreading the information far and wide, on the other hand, is what you do if you believe in truth and justice. The conflict is obvious. This is a mystery film. It begins with Batman untangling the cover-up of the Court of Owls, and realizing its scope is far beyond the hoods of Gotham. Meanwhile Superman discovers the Brainiac data seems to have disappeared. The deeper he digs, the Dark Knight is neutralized by the world's best saboteurs and martial artists. The more he goes looking for answers, the Man of Steel is attacked by Bizarro DNA-drones which can mimic his power. And all the while, the web of conspiracy grows larger — this organization has been manipulating global politics and hiding the most significant scientific breakthroughs for the past 30 years. Batman and Superman realize they are pulling the same threads. Maybe we even throw in red herrings in the form of the League of Shadows or Vandal Savage, neither of whom I'm keen to build a film around since they've been used to exhaustion between the Dark knight Trilogy and the Arrowverse. But they're great misdirects as our film holds off the Amanda Waller reveal. In the end, ever since the Rann incident, Waller has known of the existence of great and terrible power. Her solution has been total control of the world's most dangerous technology, with the means to defend it. She has built the OMAC protocol into Cadmus, a hive of superhuman bio-weapons. Perhaps in our third act, her best laid plans blow up in her face due to the rogue actions of her zealot scientist Professor Ivo. But with the help of Ray Palmer, King Faraday, and of course the intrepid Lois Lane, the world's finest duo shut down Cadmus and turn the knowledge over to the public, for good or for ill. Threats breed in darkness, and our world can no longer afford for miracles to be locked away in its darkest corners. This film rhymes with The Unknown. It is an affirmation that humanity will always rise to meet its most existential threats. The rest of the universe’s stories then go on to prove that. I know I said this film would have to introduce Wonder Woman, but I’ll be honest, I lost that thread a bit. The easy way to work it in is to make the existence of Themyscira one of the secrets Cadmus is hiding. But I'm not sure how that squares with my thoughts for Wonder Woman's solo film. She should be off in the realms of the gods, seeking the avatars of the Fourth World.I better stop here before I get carried away or something. Hopefully if you take anything away from this, it's that theme and character are far better backbones on which to build a cinematic universe than cool “versus” battles and fan-service adaptations. Not that I'm calling anything out in particular.