Category: Pitches

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DC Reboot Pitch: Green Lantern

The Deal: this is the fifth in a series of pitches for the rebooted DC Movies. I’m using AI art to mock-up these pitches, which has proven to be more amusing than accurate.

The Pitch

Who knows what green lurks in the hearts of men? The Phantom knows. Wait…

We open on an experimental craft at an air show. The announcer tells us it’s Ferris’ newest innovation, flown by Coast City’s own Martin Jordan. His young son, Hal and his wife are there, saying goodbye and wishing him luck. She’s worried, and her fear is making Hal anxious, so Martin gives Hal his leather bomber jacket, then kisses his wife. He gives the audience a wave and then climbs into the plane.

The craft screams overhead. We’re making something of a play for that Top Gun audience, so we get some nifty flying shots before the engine blows. Jordan and Ferris communicate over the radio. Ferris wants him to bring the plane down safely, because of the investment it represents. Jordan tells him the plane’s coming down hard- and if he brings it down in front of the stands a lot of people are going to get hurt. We pan down, and see that he’s already tried to eject- and it’s malfunctioned- he’s made the decision to sacrifice himself to save other people.

We watch young Hal and Carol, transfixed, afraid, as they watch the craft descend. Carol grabs Hal’s hand tight, and we cut to the modern day.

Hal is a freelance astronaut, for all intents and purposes. He works for a Space-X competitor (technically sub-contracted through Ferris Air), run by Hector Hammond. Hammond is renowned (but also considered a kook) for his intensive personality testing in who he hires. That’s because his psionic abilities put him in touch, essentially subconsciously, with the emotional spectrum, and he can feel its power even if he hasn’t figured out how to use it.

That’s the reason in his employ Hammond has John Stewart working as an aeronautical engineer, Kyle Raynor working as a graphic designer, and even Guy Gardner as his chief of security, and William Hand as his chief technician, responsible for most of the builds. He puts the Ferris Air staff through the same process, which is why he works so closely with both Carol Ferris and Hal Jordan.

Gardner needs a little extra love just because his character usually… sucks. But he doesn’t have to. See, he was beaten by his alcoholic father as a kid, and as a result hated him, and hated booze. Seeking to help kids who were struggling through similar circumstances, he put himself through school, getting dual degrees in education and social work. And he was good at it. He was empathetic, and kind. But he was still angry. One kid reminded him too much of himself, and he was shaken; that might have been the end of it, but the kid’s father found out he was talking to the school’s counselor, and burst in. Guy didn’t see him there- he only saw his own father, only saw himself cowering, and beat the living hell out of him. He likely would have ended up in prison, except the ‘arresting’ officer was his brother. Guy had been an MP in the military; that paid for his schooling. His scores were off the chart, to the degree that police forces tried to recruit him when his time in the service was up. But he didn’t like that being an MP brought out his aggressive side, so he pursued education. His father, now a captain with the Boston Police Department, is able to broker a trade: Guy works with the Boston PD for a few years, they make the charges go away; this is viable because under questioning the father confesses to child abuse, and can’t remember whether he or Guy took the first swing. Guy is a pretty good cop, but it gives him the same opportunity for violence, also giving him a template for bravado covering up his pain. He’s recruited by Hammond, who gives him a dual role, working with his human resources in a hands-on capacity, but also running his security. In most instances, Guy is insulated from the day to day, but Hammond insists on Guy also being his personal security, too, often tasked with playing the heavy, bringing him directly into conflict with Hal, who has a history of belting authority figures.

Jordan and Stewart become fast friends. They’re both military men, ones who on balance enjoyed it. They become drinking bodies and confidantes. I’d model their relationship somewhat off of Tony and Rhodey.

They tolerate the dreamer who designs most of the graphics and handles the social media for Hammond, Kyle Raynor. He looks up to them; he’s kind of the Jimmy Olsen to Hal’s Superman.

And then there’s Carol. Hal’s always had an eye for Carol… and she’s never given him the time of day. The reason is the Ferris family views Martin’s death as their fault; Carol can’t see Hal, even now, and not see that little boy her family destroyed. This led them to be protective of Hal. They hired him when no one else would- after he washed out of the Air Force after hitting his superior officer. Hal always had trouble with authority, and that’s continued with the Ferrises. Hammond is pursuing Carol, but she’s reluctant, since at this point her company is reliant on his for its survival, so a relationship would put her in an uncomfortable position.

We establish all these relationships early, because once the plot starts moving, it’s going to be pretty nonstop. But it’s during one of these nights at the bar that John finally levels with Hal. Hal sees Carol as a cold ball-buster, and it’s clear from their conversation that some of what he feels about her is residual resentment over her family’s culpability in his father’s death. John’s getting more annoyed the more Hal complains, before finally slamming down his beer. “She fought like hell for you.” At first Hal’s confused. “After you washed out, the reason no one would touch you is insuring a wash-out is expensive. You’re a literal liability. But she fought for you. Fought Hammond, fought the board- raised enough of a stink that I heard it all the way in engineering. And you know why? Because she knows there’s more to you than your record. She knows why you decked that general- why you gave her and her father so much shit. She knows your story- your real story- not the one in your file, but the man you are between those lines.”

Kyle looks up from his doodling long enough to confirm he heard about her advocating in the marketing department, too. John hammers him a little more, about not knowing what all happened between them, but that he knows she was a kid when Hal’s father died- she isn’t who he’s pissed at.And that her father pulled strings for him, too; Hal’s scores were passable but not transcendent, so part of the reason Hal got to be a pilot was because of Ferris’ intervention.

You’ve got the wrong Atrocitus. The one you want is much uglier.

We cut to Abin Sur. He has a prisoner in his ship, one taunting him for not trusting his ring, needing the ship, that his fear makes him weak, that his terror at the coming Blackest Night will be his downfall. To demonstrate this, Atrocitus uses his red power ring to tear his way out of Sur’s energy prison and attack him as he’s flying.

Hal is sitting in the cockpit of a new fighter. He has a picture of his father taped to the instruments, and while waiting for a clear runway, talks to it. “I think John’s right. I think… I think I put a lot of blame on a lot of people over the years, because I couldn’t understand why you left us- and I couldn’t be mad at you for being gone. I made things harder on people who didn’t deserve it. That’s not the kind of man I want to be, pop.” He gets told over the radio that the runway is clear, and they’re go for the test-flight.

Essentially, now that there’s a space force, there’s a need for a space fighter. Jordan gets it to break atmosphere, the purpose of the test, but then sees the alien craft hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle, taking heat damage as a result. He radios in that he’s in pursuit of a crashing craft. Hammond tells him to leave it- he’s completed his task, and every second more risks everything. Hal knows whoever is piloting that craft is going to need assistance, and their only hope is getting help there as soon as possible- requiring accurate coordinates of the crash site, though he’s largely unable to articulate this past his anti-authority knee jerk. Carol is in the room with Hammond, and tries to explain that’s who Hal is. Hammond dismisses her as having a soft spot for Jordan. She’s still in denial, but Hammond sees that Jordan stands in the way of the future he wants with Carol. He asks her to leave, to let him talk to Jordan alone.

Sur and Atrocitus fight but it’s clear that Sur has already lost, and isn’t even able to protect himself as the ship crashes. Atrocitus wonders if he’ll be able to take Sur’s ring once he’s dead; Sur whispers something to his ring, and it flies off his finger as they crash.

Hammond tries one last time to convince Hal to come back, telling him he’s risking the entire project. When Jordan refuses, he hits a button beneath his desk, and Jordan’s engine explodes, sabotaging his ejector and landing gear as well. Hammond taunts Jordan with the reality of the situation- he can let the plane fly level, and hit Coast City, or he can ditch in the desert like his father. Hal points the jet at the desert, before catching his father’s photo out of the corner of his eye, and realizing he’s about to die like him. “I get it. You didn’t hesitate to do the right thing.” Something green flies into the cockpit, and onto Hal’s finger. “Hal Jordan, you have the ability to overcome great fear,” the ring tells him, and a green energy sheath enfolds him as the ship hits the sand.

Jordan opens his eyes a moment later, floating towards Sur’s wreckage. Sur is dying. Sur touches the ring, and calls to Sinestro to help capture his prisoner and stop the Blackest Night. A surge of energy engulfs Jordan as the signal is sent interstellar, and Jordan passes out. He wakes to find Sinestro there. Sinestro explains that the strain of that kind of communication can take a lot out of a Green Lantern- especially a fresh recruit. Sinestro offers to train him while they search for Atrocitus. Hal bristles at being under this new authority, but also kind of gets caught up in all of it, too.

Hal never believed his mother that if he kept making that face it would stay that way, until…

Atrocitus is mostly laying low. He knows the Earth is not without its own heroes, and hopes to locate his quarry without drawing attention, because while being the leader of a Corps., he hasn’t figured out how to recruit new members, so it’s just him, for now. It doesn’t take much; his ring is able to connect to the internet, and finds William Hand quickly.

Sinestro and Hal camp in the desert, where Sinestro preaches a parallel lesson, that to effectively combat an enemy, one must understand them. He gives Hal access to Atrocitus’ files in the Corps., usually blocked off without special permissions. Hal is horrified that the Guardians raised his sector, but Sinestro is cold about it- saying that they were a threat to all the sectors, and while the Manhunters were overzealous, hence their replacement by sentients- the war they fought was just.

The next day, Atrocitus attacks Hammond’s building; Hand’s employment there is public record, but his home address is not. That brings him into direct conflict with Guy Gardner. Atrocitus chews through the security staff, but his ring recognizes in Guy a potential recruit, and splits, one of the rings recruiting Guy. Guy, essentially in a fugue state of rage, leads Atrocitus directly to Hand, who was walking Carol and Hammond through a new innovation.

The battle between good and evil was always going to come down to rock paper scissors…

At that moment, Sinestro and Hal arrive. Hal wants to confront Hammond for trying to murder him, but goes to aid Sinestro, instead. Together they might be able to take Atrocitus, but the addition of Guy makes it too much. Hal peels off Guy, and then connects to all of his public records. We watch as pages flip past, as the ring scans information into Hal’s mind. “Wait,” Hal says to his ring. “It’s too much. It’s his whole life, but it’s also… the least important parts of his life. He isn’t… he’s more than that man on paper.”

To make it more dynamic for the audience we cut to a series of vignettes. We see Guy as a child with his father in a polceman’s uniform in his captain’s office. Guy has a black eye and a bleeding lip. “Rolly, you’re a great cop, but you got too much anger in you. You can’t take it home and take it out on your kids. This is the last time I look the other way. Understand?”

We cut to later, Guy, now an adult, a little ruffled, talking to a different cop. “Guy, you want to hit people, say the word; I can make this go away, and put you in a uniform. You’re my brother, and I love you, but a school counselor can’t go belting parents.”

“He was dad.”

“I know. I’ve seen the referrals to child protective services. He’s a real piece of work.”

“No. I didn’t see him. I saw dad. I was fighting back against our dad, the way we couldn’t when he’d hit us.”

“Christ. I know how he was, okay? And I know you took as many beatings for me as you could. But you gotta do something about this rage. Sometimes the only thing I can do is give it to the right people.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Look, I spoke to dad. He pulled strings. Charges dropped… but you got to come work with us.”

“Then lock me up.”

“Look. Dad still sucks. Still tries to make me think we made up all those times he beat on us. But this is it, your best bet. No school will touch you, now. But you do your time as a uniform, and maybe one will take you on as a resource officer, and you can go back to helping kids.”

Later, the both of them, a little older.

“I did my time,” Guy says angrily.

“You’re breaking dad’s heart.”

“I don’t believe he has one to break. And I’m done hurting people. I found a job that will let me connect, and not with my fist.” He grabs his brother’s shoulder. “Don’t be dad. Get out of this job while you still got enough of a soul to be something else.”

Back in the modern moment, Hal puts his hand on Guy’s shoulder. Guy punches him, and punches him between every line. “You don’t have to be your father. You don’t have to hurt people. You care- I get that now. You want to connect- and not with your fists.” Guy stops, and tears the red ring off his finger with a howl of unadulterated anger, sending it bouncing across the floor.

Sinestro is being beaten, badly, by Atrocitus, who is using the moment to preach to William Hand about his destiny, about his greatness, about the bleak havoc he will reek on a deserving universe (one he blames for allowing the Guardians to run rampant). Things change as Guy and Hal, now both wearing Green Lantern rings, burst in. The three Green Lanterns, even with two of them being relatively green (pun intended), make short work of Atrocitus, and recapture him.

50 Shades of Green: The 10-hour deleted scene where Kilowog teaches Sinestro the meaning of ‘submission.”

In the aftermath, Hal, now back in civilian clothes, finds Carol. Hammond has left, an extended sabbatical, leaving Carol in charge of his entire operation. Her head is swimming, and she’s freaked out by the increased responsibility. He puts his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t want to add to an already overfull plate, but… I know I’m not always the easiest man to know. So I wanted to thank you, and your family, for looking out for me. You didn’t have to. What happened with my dad, it was an accident; accidents happen, especially when you’re a test pilot on the bleeding edge. Dad loved being there, and he understood the risks, just like I do. And I know the risks you’ve taken with me, and I wanted to tell you I am so grateful for that, and so sorry for not being able to process all of this in a healthier way sooner, and for all the crap you took from me because of that. But there’s one last risk I’d love for you to take on me: would you let me take you to dinner?”

“No,” she says coldly. “But I’ll let you buy me coffee, and we’ll see how that goes.”

They don’t even realize Hector is lurking in the background. We follow him as he storms away, back to his room. He opens a safe, a lead-lined safe, and takes out a gleaming rock, and we see his head pulse.

We have two end-credits scenes. In the first, Hammond, still clutching his rock, visits Hand in his lab. He’s in possession of the Red Lantern ring Gardner removed- although he can no longer activate it. But during the fight his equipment got enough solid readings from them that he thinks he can reverse-engineer their power signature- he suspects his black ring can steal the energy of a Green Lantern ring and use it himself. Given enough time, he might even be able to figure out a way to power it himself. Hammond smiles.

In the second, Sinestro takes Hal to Oa, to speak with the Guardians. They tell him the first prophecy in the book of the Black has come true with the return of the first of the Five Inversions. They say they’re going to need to begin recruiting for the battles ahead, and Hal says he might know some good guys.

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DC Reboot Pitch: Wonder Woman

This is the fourth in a series of pitches for the rebooted DC Movies.

Note: I got really excited at the prospect of using AI art to mock-up these pitches, cause real talk, a pitch with pictures is a thousand times more exciting than one with just words (I think that’s how the quote goes). And AI is largely not up to the task. But we can still have some weird fun as we roll with this punch.

I’m going to try not to duplicate myself, despite this not being my first Wonder Woman rodeo. Or my second, for that matter…

Pitch

Little known fact: Amazons fletched their arrows with plump worms, or their own torn-off fingers.

Wonder Woman begins with a hunt. The Amazons are tracking a sacred deer, hunted only once a year and slaughtered in honor of Artemis. We cut back and forth, to earlier in the day, where Hippolyta wants her daughter to participate in the hunt, to really participate, to compete. Diana doesn’t want to; she doesn’t want to use the advantage of her gifts over her sisters, and she doesn’t like killing. Hippolyta offers her what she’s wanted so desperately for over a century- permission to leave to intervene in Man’s world. If she wins. Diana leaves, angry at her mother’s attempts to control her.

Many Amazons loose their arrows, but it is eventually Diana who overtakes the beast. She lunges at it, deflecting her sisters’ arrows with her bracelets. She refuses to kill it, and lets it free. The other Amazons are in awe; most of them can’t hit it with an arrow, but Diana captured it by hand. We intercut with earlier; Antiope pulls Diana to the side, and says winning doesn’t have to involve killing- in fact, in winning she can make sure there isn’t any death. The Amazons stare in amazement at Diana. One murmurs about her being a hunter to rival the goddess Artemis herself.

We pull back, and Artemis, the goddess, slaps the reflecting pool she was watching the hunt through. Hera, her adoptive mother is there, and asks what troubles her. She’s angry, at the deer not being sacrificed to her, at the Amazons daring to compare Diana to a goddess. Hera asks if mercy, and forgoing its flesh, is not itself a sacrifice. Artemis angrily tells her that a hunt does not end in mercy, and storms off.

We flash back, to show Wonder Woman has been asking to intervene in the world of man since the first World War. Every time, her mother consulted Athena, and every time, the goddess of wisdom told the Amazons to stay hidden.

We cut to day. Steve Trevor and Barbara Minerva are in a dogfight in the skies near Paradise Island. Her tail has Cheetah stripes; she’s developed a reputation as a Cheetah, ripping scores from the jaws of meaner and hungrier predators. For that reason one of her prized possessions is a cheetah-skin wrap she was given after the completion of a successful job, and she’s rarely without it. He’s pursuing her, but they’re both gifted pilots. The fight lasts long enough to justify featuring in the trailer, so we can go after that Top Gun: Maverick money.

Minerva’s jet crashes into the island’s invisible bubble, which keeps the Amazons hidden, even from satellite, an instant before Steve’s does. Normally Barbara could take him hand to hand, but his landing was slightly softer, since he had a moment more to prepare for the crash, so Steve triumphs, and pockets a canister of microfiche she had.

The Amazons find him standing over a bloodied Minerva. Being naturally distrustful of men, they believe Barbara’s story that Steve is a spy she was hunting, and they hold him captive. She gets free reign of the island, and begins stealing artifacts and sizing up the Amazons defenses.

This Barbara Minerva’s stepfather abused her and her mother; he made her feel small, inconsequential, vulnerable, so she joined the military immediately after high school. She told everyone it was to pay for her degree in anthropology… but both were means to never having to feel like a bigger predator’s prey ever again. Since graduating she has been working as a mercenary in world conflicts to gain access to sacred sites to pillage them, occasionally passing intelligence between shady groups as a side hustle (because when in Rome). That’s why Steve was after her- she has information that could be vital to stopping a terror attack. It’s not a huge detail, but it’s being orchestrated by higher powers; it isn’t a coincidence she ended up on Paradise Island. Eventually she finds a shrine to Artemis. Sensing a kindred spirit, Artemis lures a cheetah to the shrine, and it attacks Minerva, shredding her fur. She kills it with her bare hands.

Clearly the Cheetah has broken her right arm so badly it’s facing the wrong direction.

Artemis blesses Barbara for her killer instinct with a boon, and turns her into her avatar on Earth- transforming her into the mystically powered Cheetah, in the hopes to use her new disciple to gain revenge for the snub during the hunt. She’s capable of transforming into a lethal cat woman and back at will- subterfuge being one of a hunter’s greatest strengths. She continues hunting for artifacts and intelligence, but also has new prey in her sights: Wonder Woman.

Diana wants desperately to leave the island. She knows with her gifts she could be doing so much good in the world, even if she’s naïve about what the world actually is. To that end, she splits her time between Barbara and Steve, trying to learn as much as she can, initially building a friendship with Barbara and a rivalry with Steve. But she personally knows the goddess of wisdom; eventually she starts to realize something isn’t right about Barbara, and that Steve maybe isn’t what her prejudices tell her.

Good God, what have they done to his hands? The monsters!

During the day, Trevor is interrogated brutally by Amazons. At night, Diana sneaks in, to question him about world conflicts she regrets them not intervening in, and the state of the world. He sees it as a technique; she’s keeping him from sleeping, while also playing good cop. Eventually he snaps and confronts her, and her naivete convinces him that she really is genuinely concerned about the damage their inaction makes them complicit in. He tells her he’s been through SERE school- Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape- that the first principle of interrogation is that all the prisoner has to do is hold out until his intelligence is no longer valuable. The problem is he’s on the other side of that equation- the intel he needs to get out to the world to stop harm is only useful for a very short, very set period of time. Minerva was the go-between, putting teams in place for a strike. She doesn’t know what it is, only that she needed a diverse team from certain groups, to make an assault look like a coordinated attack from the Axis of Evil, potentially touching off World War 3, but at a minimum hurting a lot of innocent people and sowing conflict.

Meanwhile, Hippolyta uses her tiara (which will eventually be part of Diana’s costume) to open a portal to Olympus. She asks Athena what they should do with Trevor. Athena tells the queen he must be executed- but not just any execution, it needs to be shown to the world, so that they know Amazonian sovereignty is not to be infringed on. Hippolyta is troubled by the demand, but has learned over the years not to question the Gods, and sets about making preparations.

Diana discusses with Trevor her reservations, finally resolving to confront her mother. But on the way she’s attacked by Minerva. She’s a fierce, formidable woman, now, even beyond her mercenary skills and training, and nearly kills Diana before Steve intervenes, having picked his restraints some time ago. After helping her chase off Cheetah, he willingly walks back into his cell and puts back on his chains. Diana tells him he should flee, that they plan to execute him. He says he knows- that she’s stayed because of him, but when she leaves she might be able to pass his intel to someone who can stop the attack- that the mission is more important than one man.

Diana goes to her mother. Hippolyta doesn’t take much convincing, and agrees to take Diana to speak with Athena, believing that a goddess of wisdom must see reason. Athena gives a speech, a sweeping one, about the old Gods not being respected, and the Amazons, as their chosen daughters, similarly not being respected, that the only way to place both in the esteem they deserve is with a sacrifice. Diana squares to Athena. “I was gifted wisdom by the goddess Athena, and he is no Athena,” her hand instinctively goes to her lasso, to telegraph that her next step is forcing the truth from him.

Ares laughs, ending his charade. “I overplayed, didn’t I? Ah, well, the deed is done. You’ve delayed Trevor’s mission long enough there is no stopping what comes next, and the nations of the world will still blame you.”

They leave, and Diana asks if they finished studying Steve and Minerva’s planes- it turns out the Amazons have been reverse-engineering them since the incursion. Hippolyta says yes. Diana tells her to feed the information into their invisible dome- a gift from the gods to keep them hidden- that if she can form it into a plane it might be able to get her there in time to stop Ares’ plan. Hippolyta objects, because that will leave their island exposed for all the world to see, and Diana says, “We are rejoining man’s world, mother; that decision has been taken from us by Ares. But we can still decide who we are when we do.” Hippolyta allows her to go.

Steve flies, since the plane is largely designed after his aircraft; as it takes off we see Minerva latch on to the underside, before all three of them and the plane disappear.

Steve gives Diana the microfiche, and she’s able to form one of the panels of the ship to make it readable. She studies it on the trip.

The attack is on Brussels, and the European Union seat. Three teams, one Baltic, one Middle Eastern, and one Asian, attack the EU. The perimeter guards aren’t up to fighting off this many trained infiltrators, who start setting bombs. Wonder Woman lands on one of the teams, and proceeds to systematically take the teams apart, knowing precisely where they’ll be and prepared for the fight thanks to Steve’s intel.

There’s a final fight with Cheetah, who ambushes her at an inopportune moment- say as a bomb is about to go off near a pair of wounded guards. Minerva baits her, believing she can force Wonder Woman to sacrifice herself to save the men- which would make her worse than prey- she’s a willing sacrifice for the men around her. Diana lets herself be knocked towards the bomb; an instant later it flies into the air, where it explodes relatively harmlessly. Diana catches Cheetah in the lasso, pulling her back for one last haymaker.

In retrospect, expecting it to paint me a were-cheetah might have been asking too much.

An EU security team descends on Diana, guns drawn. Steve arrives, shouting that he has an Interpol contact, that she’s with them, and they aren’t with the terrorists- they stopped them. They get confirmation quickly- Steve’s handler knew the attack was imminent and was waiting for his intel to try to stop the attack.

We pull back, and see that it’s Ares rewatching Diana through the watery portal. He’s smiling. “You’re in high spirits, considering you lost,” Artemis pouts.

“Did I?” he asks.

“Didn’t we both?” she sulks.

“I sowed chaos, forced the Amazons to reveal themselves, and their nature. You taught your most ardent believers not to take you for granted. We’re Gods. We don’t lose, we just evolve the game.”

Artemis is getting tired of him. “I think you are about to lose, some teeth, maybe an eye.” He doesn’t see what she does: Wonder Woman is behind him, and throws a punch that knocks his helm off, and sends its sliding across the floor.

“Where’s Athena?” she demands. Ares believes they can strike up a compromise, but Diana isn’t hearing it. “Produce her, or I’ll be the only one doing any striking.” Artemis is now actively amused, and taunts him that Athena is going to be very cross with him, idly wondering what happens when a God and Goddess of war go to war. Then Artemis, always on the hunt, goes for the kill, and taunts him that Athena is the goddess of wisdom- intelligent combat and strategy. He’s the god of drunken bar brawls and soccer riots. You can see how much it grinds Ares, because he knows she’s right.

We cut to Athena, Hippolyta and Diana later. Athena’s apologetic over Ares impersonating her, but also restrained- she knows what would come of a war with Ares. She also knows what Ares’ plots have cost them. Hippolyta is glad to have her wisdom back to guide the Amazons, especially now. Athena is more concerned; her wisdom tells her that the consequences of Ares’ plots are not yet complete- but recognizes that her absence has allowed one particular conflict to grow, and bids Hippolyta to tell her daughter the truth. Hippolyta tells Diana that she leaned on Athena not just for her wisdom, but because… “You raise a daughter, hoping to protect her from the world, knowing you will utterly fail. I couldn’t stand the thought of failing to protect you… which became a failure of a different kind.”

Diana puts a hand on her mother’s arm. “A mother’s task is not to protect her children, it’s to ensure they have the tools, strength, and courage to defend themselves, and the wisdom to know when to show mercy.” She pulls her mother close. “You’ve protected me long enough.” She lets her go. “Now it’s time for me to protect our sisters, our home, our world.”

“Our world,” Hippolyta says breathlessly. “I dreamed of a day the Amazons’ world would not be so small… now I worry it’s grown too wide and too wild.”

“Then it’s good I have so many sisters to help me keep her safe,” Diana says, throwing an arm around her mother.

Roll credits.

In an end-credits scene, Cheetah is being escorted away by Interpol in cuffs. They’re met by Amanda Waller, and a detachment from Task Force X to take her into custody. Minerva doesn’t look up at Waller, not until the very last word. “Dr. Minerva. You’re going to spend the rest of your natural life in prison- possibly an unnatural life- depending on what exactly Artemis did to you. There might be an alternative, though it’s not without risks. Some might even call it suicide.” Minerva fixes Waller with a glare; she’s practically feral, but we cut to black before she can snap her restraints.

END NOTE: Okay, so I feel I have to justify the image I shared this with. See, after attempts to get the AI to create a were-cheetah failed, I just had it create Wonder Woman fighting a werewolf. And for some reason, in one of them, the werewolf was wearing her costume. I don’t… know why. But it’s an amazing image. I couldn’t not use it (I don’t personally have that kind of restraint).

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The Secret Bonus Wonder Woman Pitch

Back in 2013, I pitched this Wonder Woman movie. I still dig it, as a coming-of-age version of her story- a true origin for her.

The Wonder Woman Movie

In the Amazon throne room, Diana’s mother forces her to choose in a Solomon-like conflict between two Amazons. She finds a solution that seems to half-please all involved. Hippolyta gives 18-year old Diana a dressing down. She says her daughter has absorbed too much of the philosophical ideas about being an Amazon, without learning their practical application- that a leader must be prepared to be tough and ruthless. Diana is more concerned with what she saw as right, and storms off.

Cut to a US fighter jet. He’s flying in a joint NATO exercise over the Mediterranean, when one of the French planes breaks formation. Over the radio, the pilot, Steve Trevor, is informed that they can’t raise the pilot- he isn’t responding. A moment later, more excitedly, they explain that the plane has been ‘mistakenly’ armed with a nuclear warhead.

Trevor breaks formation to pursue the other craft. Over the radio, Trevor hears a command from an unknown source. “Kill the American.” The other French planes break formation, and attack him. Trevor manages to shoot down two of the planes, before his own jet is damaged to the point of being incapable of firing. Rather than let the rogue pilot escape with a nuclear warhead, he smashes his plane into him, and both planes go down.

Trevor wakes up on Paradise Island, surrounded by beautiful women. He asks if he’s in Heaven. Hippolyta tells him that for him, it’s closer to hell, and stomps him into unconsciousness. We cut to Trevor in a cell, looking haggard. He tells them what he can: his name, rank, and serial number.

Cut to Hippolyta, discussing with her inner circle the man’s presence and its implication- someone has discovered their island- and worse, he brought war to it. Both planes crashed on the island. The advisers tell Hippolyta there were casualties and she storms off, and into Trevor’s cell. She rages at Trevor for the deaths he caused. He’s visibly shaken by the news, and apologizes. He explains that the man he killed had stolen a weapon of great power- the kind of weapon no sane person wants to wield. “Peace through force,” she says, signaling a kind of understanding. But his presence is still troubling, and his methods still violent and imprecise. Hippolyta retires to think, but also calls her advisors.

Meanwhile, Diana converses with an Amazon of African descent a few years her junior named Lyta. Because of Diana’s mother, they know about Trevor, while it’s being kept secret from most of the Amazons at this point. And they’re fascinated. Diana admits that she’s always felt stifled on the island. She feels like she’s been a caged bird, or a fish in a tank, when she’s meant to swim and to fly. Her friend is skeptical, and tells her it must be terrible being the beautiful daughter and heir apparent to the most powerful and respected woman on the island. Diana asks if she’s never wanted to see more of the world. Lyta hesitates, because she knows that look: Diana is about to do something reckless.

Cut back to Hippolyta, now meeting with her advisors. The outside world has made contact. She knows they can’t maintain their isolation any longer. Her scouts tell her that US ships patrol the area near the mouth of the Mediterranean, where it meets the Atlantic, looking for Trevor, his ship, the French pilot or the bomb. Hippolyta discusses with her science and military advisors. Her scientists are skeptical that their cloaking tech will stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Moreso, they understand that while they’ve held a technical edge, they are going to lose it; a small island nation can’t continue to outpace an entire industrialized world. One military advisor, Antiope, wants to attack the ships, while the other, Philippus, says, “There will always be more ships.”

Hippolyta knows that there must be peace; perhaps through force- but peace is her ultimate goal. She tells her advisors that they need an ambassador. Antiope quietly tells her second in command, Drucilla, to interrogate the prisoner, to see what else he might know. Drucilla is about Diana’s age; she’s a mirror image of Diana, what the character might have turned out to be if she was a part of the Amazon’s military instead of its Princess. And yes, this is a stealth introduction of Donna Troy- Wonder Girl.

Diana sneaks into the prison where Trevor’s being held. She brings him food, and water. She asks him about his world. He assumes he’s being played- that she’s good cop, but he plays along. Diana hears Drucilla enter, and hides. She throws the food Diana brought him against the wall, then throws him into the wall after it. She sneers, and reels back to hit him. Diana intervenes, and uses a martial arts roll to redirect the attack and leave the lieutenant on her back. She’s stunned a moment, before realizing who attacked her. She knows she can’t brutalize the prisoner with Diana there, but needs to leave, quickly. “Your mother will hear of this,” she says, and storms off.

“And your commander will, too,” Diana hits back. 

Cut to the throne room again, and Hippolyta is holding back her daughter while Antiope holds back Drucilla; they’re arguing, but it’s moments from becoming a brawl. Hippolyta asks if it’s true, and the bickering continues, until she directs her glare to Antiope. She sighs, and admits that it is. Hippolyta says that she’ll overlook the indiscretion, so long as she and her second can be more discreet in the future. Then she instructs them to leave.

Hippolyta tells Diana that they’re going to nominate an ambassador, decided by a trial. Diana’s excited. She talks at a fast clip about how the island should share its advanced technologies and philosophy, of all the lives they could change and save. Her mother forbids her from participating; she says by right the position should be Diana’s, but that she’s proven that she isn’t ready for the weight of the responsibility- tonight being the most recent example.

Diana storms off. Lyta follows her to the beach, still scarred by the wreckage of Trevor’s plane. She sits on the shore, and stares at the ships patrolling just a little ways off. The friend talks about Diana, and how she’s special- particularly in that she’s not a clone, like most of the Amazons. But beyond that, she’s always known Diana was special, that she’d do special things. She hated it a little, because it also meant she’d leave her. But she never blamed Diana- she can’t blame birds for flying away, it’s simply who they are.

Hippolyta posts her personal guard outside Trevor’s cell to prevent further attempts to harm him. Drucilla is at first annoyed, because it means they can’t further interrogate him. Antiope sees it as an opportunity. Without her guards, Hippolyta is vulnerable. She tells Drucilla to assemble likeminded soldiers for a coup, set for the climax of the trials.

Hippolyta announces the nature of the trial. There will be three parts, centered around the most important values of their culture: strength, wisdom, and stamina. The first test is strength- personal combat. Diana defies her mother, and stands for the trial. Hippolyta tries to argue that her daughter should be disqualified. Philippus disagrees; if they gods favor her, who are they to disagree?

Diana is well-known for her fighting prowess, and the gathered Amazons quickly favor her with chanting and applause. But coming up on the other side of the bracket is a fighter whose brutality is difficult for the other warriors to cope with, named Artemis. During their climactic fight, Diana allows herself to be bested, while protecting an Amazon bystander from some environmental hazard caused by the fight (debris, a loose spear, whatever).

Hippolyta argues for her daughter to lose. The advisors, in this capacity also serving as judges, discuss it, and one of them announces that “Strength is not to be equated with unchecked violence. On occasion, that means having the strength to lose with grace, and the strength to protect others over ourselves.”

Diana is presented the tiara for winning, but is warned that because it increases her empathy, it could tilt the rest of the contest in her favor, in particular the next event. She wisely sets it down at the table in front of her mother, for safe keeping, a move that pleases the other judges, and annoys Hippolyta.

Next comes wisdom, an oral argument for each candidate’s place as the Amazonian ambassador. Artemis believes that “Man’s world” needs to be brought to heel. Diana argues persuasively that, “It isn’t man’s world. It’s ours. We’ve spent too much time living apart from it, pretending like we’re above it. We have failed this world with our silence. We can brook that failure no longer.”

Hippolyta is furious that she seems to have won the crowd. One of her advisors points out, “She’s every bit her mother’s daughter.” She’s still angry, but it’s hard for her not to look on her daughter with some pride.

Diana is awarded the bracelets, and is permitted to wear them, as they should have no bearing on the next contest. Hippolyta reminds all the candidates that the contest is not over. Her daughter’s awards for besting individual contests does not rule her the winner. Because the trial is about their conduct, how they maintain themselves in the face of odds, against dangers and adversity- particularly the adversity of defeat. She looks at Artemis when she says this.

Next is the stamina trial, to quest for a sacred lasso. It’s essentially a foot race, over the island. But the island is filled with dangers, and animals our world has never seen. Artemis plans out a trap for her. She captures Lyta, and uses her as bait, to lure Diana into a fight with a monstrous lizard. It’s doubly clever, because violence in this contest will cause Diana to lose instantly. Diana manages to evade the creature, while saving Lyta, only for Artemis to then be attacked by the lizard. Artemis panics, and assumes that she’s about to die, largely by her own hand, when Diana rescues her, and gets the lizard to trap itself beneath the roots of a large tree.

Diana gets Artemis to safety, then goes back to the lizard. Artemis doesn’t understand, but Lyta does. “You don’t get it, do you?” she asks.

“It will kill her,” Artemis says.

“And it will die if she doesn’t help.” Even while the lizard snaps at her, Diana works to free it from the tree. She manages to get its head loose, and it immediately attacks her. She runs for her life. Artemis notices that she’s being careful where she leads it, particularly away from the other contestants, and away from the city. “They could help her,” Artemis says.

“They’d kill it. And maybe some of our sisters would be hurt, too.”

Artemis goes back to the chase. We see her climb a rocky tower, intercut with Diana, running through the trees as the lizard tramples smaller trees chasing her, getting closer with every second. Artemis lays hands on the rope, which glows. Diana turns, and the lizard chomps on her bracelets, but can’t break through them. She scrambles out from underneath it, and runs again. We see her run between two trees. Suddenly, the golden rope is pulled taught between them, and catches the lizard in the jaw.

Artemis loosens the rope from the tree, and runs at the lizard, and manages to tie the rope the rest of the way around the lizard. Once it’s done, the rope glows brightly, and the lizard lays down, docile. She unties it. She walks to Diana, with the rope in hand. Then she kneels, and presents Diana the rope. “I was never worthy of it,” she says. Diana refuses to take it. “Worth is something proven, and earned.” She helps her rival stand. “We’re worth our measure only when we continue to strive to be better.”

Artemis holds onto the lasso, until they reach the arena. She places it on the table before Hippolyta, beside the tiara, to make it clear she believes the lasso to be Diana’s. Hippolyta is first confused by the gesture, then understands it. She recuses herself from the final judgment; she realizes that she’s been feuding with Diana as a daughter she wants to protect, not the woman she is.

Philippus delivers a speech, “That true leadership means inspiring the best in all of us, even from our rivals.” She commends everyone’s performance- and says that she has never been prouder to be an Amazon, and mentions in particular Artemis as a woman she wouldn’t want to stand on the other side of a spear from- or a lectern. Then she instructs Diana to rise, and join them on the podium.

That is when Antiope rises, and stands menacingly over Hippolyta. “Your daughter isn’t going to be ambassador. Our ambassador will be the point of a spear.” She levels one at Hippolyta.  At that moment, Drucilla runs Antiope through with a short sword. She’s heartbroken, and explains to Hippolyta that she tried to gently guide her away from her destructive path, but failed. It’s clear from the guards’ and soldiers’ reactions that the coup never went farther than her. Hippolyta asks Philippus to take the woman into custody, for debrief. Then she says that it’s her honor to name her daughter their ambassador.

In private, Hippolyta reveals two things to her daughter. One, the Amazons have reverse-engineered the two planes, and crafted one of their own. Second, as the Amazon’s champion, she is bestowed with additional gifts, bestowed by their gods: strength, speed, flight, hardiness.

Diana leaves the meeting with her mother. And then she runs, all the way across the island in the blink of an eye, overshooting, and running across the water, past one of the US ships, before taking to the air. A lookout on the US ship asks another seawoman what he just saw- a UFO. “I don’t think I saw anything,” she says, “and I don’t think you did, either.”

Cut to the exterior of the prison, where Diana lands somewhat roughly leaving an impact crater. She walks inside, and asks if Trevor’s ready for transport. One of the guards explains that the doctor hasn’t cleared him. Diana tells one of them to get the doctor right away.

The next day, she flies herself, Trevor, the remains of the two planes, and the bomb, in a stealth jet- based on the same tech that hides her island away. She tells him it’s her first flight, though it looks to be the same interface they use for all of their computer systems- which doesn’t make him feel at ease.

The plane cloaks as it leaves the island’s own cloaking shield, as Hippolyta watches from the throne room from the first scene. Cryptically, Philippus says to her, “You didn’t tell her.” Hippolyta says that her daughter has a world to protect- now isn’t the time to burden her with an Underworld, as well. Philippus is concerned- they’ll need her for the coming struggle. Hippolyta is convinced her daughter will come when the time dictates it. Essentially, Paradise Island sits on top of a Hellmouth- it’s the place on Earth where things from the Underworld can spill over. Gotta lay ground for that sequel.

As Diana’s plane approaches New York, Trevor implores her to let him contact his superiors. “You can’t just fly a nuclear bomb onto a US air field and expect to be greeted as anything other than a threat.” She lets him set up a landing at a US base.

They’re met by the entire base, including its commander, all pointing guns at Diana. He tries to arrest Diana. Trevor protests. “That woman’s an ambassador, from a nation so technologically advanced you can’t fathom it. They built that plane over the course of a week after looking at scraps of mine and the French one I shot down. You don’t want to start a war with the one nation we might not be able to beat.”

The commander hesitates a moment, before the US Ambassador to the UN walks out, and nods at him. He puts away the cuffs, and asks, “Is there anywhere I can escort you, madam ambassador?”

Cut to the UN. Diana is presented by the US Ambassador to the general assembly. Trevor is with them. She thanks Diana, and by extension her people, for returning the nuclear weapon, and for not proliferating their use- possibly getting in a dig about discussing international patent law over the tech in her plane. Diana looks uncomfortable at the applause she receives, as Trevor leans over to ask the ambassador how the hell the weapon ever got off the chain.

A diplomat sitting near them listens intently in his headphones. Through an unused set of headphones, Trevor hears the voice from earlier say, “He heard my voice.” The diplomat takes a pistol from his desk, and tries to shoot Trevor.  Diana steps between them, and blocks the bullets with her bracelets.

Diana uses her lasso on the would-be assassin. It breaks the diplomat from his hypnotic spell. Trevor and the US Ambassador convince the police to give her a moment with the diplomat. He explains that he saw a therapist, and that he heard that therapist’s voice a moment before he tried to shoot Trevor, and found it irresistible. He claimed not to know how the gun got there. Diana believes him, but the ambassador’s skeptical. Diana hands her a piece of the lasso. “Tell me something true you don’t want to.” “Your age and weight,” Trevor adds. Before she can, Diana takes the rope back. “I would have told you; I don’t even like that my doctor knows.”

Trevor accompanies her to find the diplomat’s therapist. He drives, remarking that he can’t believe all of this was caused by some, “Psycho Doctor,” (the character’s comic name is Dr. Psycho). She asks why a woman wouldn’t want to admit her age or weight. He explains that some people think women have a shelf life. He says he thinks they get better with age.

We see men on the military base. We hear what they hear over their radios: “Stop them.” Suddenly, a tank drives out into traffic in the streets ahead of Trevor’s car. Diana opens the door. “Don’t stop,” she says. He tries to tell her that’s a tank, as she rolls out of the car. The tank fires, and she’s engulfed in smoke and flame.

Music swells as the fireball dissipates, and the concussion from the blast carries the smoke away. Diana has her arms crossed in an x in front of her, where she blocked the shell with her bracelets. She reels back, in a fighting pose, then sprints toward the tank. A machine-gun mounted on the tank tries to track her, only managing to pepper the ground where she’d been with bullets- perhaps occasionally requiring her to deflect the odd one with her bracelet. She reaches the tank, and tears the turret away. An instant later she’s on top of the tank, and drops her lasso around the tank crew. “Where is he?” she asks.

“The doctor is in,” they say in unison, before coming to their senses.

Cut a few hundred feet down the street. We see the outline of a plane flying overhead, towards the tank, and pull back to reveal the fighter jet itself, flying low between the skyscrapers. It begins to fire from a machine-gun, strafing fire towards Diana. She looks behind herself, at the tank crew who would be caught in the fire if she simply sidestepped. She stands her ground, and deflects the shots from the plane- though these knock her around a bit because they’re bigger, and require more jumping around to deflect.

One of the bullets ricochets back down the plane’s fuselage, breaches its engine and fuel, and the plane catches fire. She flies after it. The plane is about to smash into a bus full of frightened but also entranced schoolchildren. We see Diana’s reflection in the window as a young girl watches her fly in front of the plane, drop her lasso around it and yank it above the bus at the last second. “Whoa,” the little girl says.

Diana uses the rope to guide the plane to a controlled crash on top of a building. She rips the canopy off the plane, and the pilot fires a shot at her from his sidearm. She deflects it, and lassos him. He stares unbelieving at the gun, then manages to mumble an apology. She flies off.

Trevor has arrived at the high-rise offices of the diplomat’s therapist, and he’s got his service weapon in hand. He’s mumbling about her telling him, “Don’t stop. Not all of us can stop bullets, in ways that don’t,” he jabs himself in the chest, “hurt.”

He hears the voice again. “An excellent idea. Stop all the bullets.” We see the owner of the voice, a short, but relatively handsome man, in a suit. He points his finger as if it were a gun at his own head. Trevor follows suit, with his gun. He’s trembling, trying to fight it, but he can’t.

Diana’s lasso wraps around his hand, and jerks the gun down and away as he fires. “Don’t,” she says. “K,” he mumbles, and drops to the floor.

“You,” the doctor says, “should tell me how to get you out of that little number. Zipper in the back, snaps in the front?” He smiles, pleased with himself. She tosses the lasso around him, and cinches it tight. “Crap.”

Trevor gets up off the floor, complaining that it feels like he was kicked in the head by a donkey. Then he asks if he can kick the doctor. A helicopter strafes the building, filling it full of gunfire that conveniently misses the doctor. Trevor, huddled behind a desk, asks her if she can fight off a helicopter, and when a second appears, firing on them from the other side of the building, “or two.” She says she can, but innocent people will get hurt. “Stop them,” she says to the therapist. He picks up his radio, and sighs. “Stand down,” he says.

Then she tells him he’s going to explain what he wanted with the weapon. He tells them that the weapon was merely a means to an end. “What ‘we’ wanted was violence, chaos.” A world where a man like him could rule. She asks what he meant by “we.” He tries to resist, to not tell the truth. Then he screams out in pain, and passes out.

Trevor says that he thought she said that no one could avoid telling the truth under the lasso’s sway. She says that’s what she thought. They get the doctor up, and lead him to the reception area of the office. A befuddled guard is trying to keep a gathering of reporters outside, to protect patient confidentiality. Trevor remarks that the vultures descended fast. He tells her it’s a whole new world out there, now, and asks her if she’s ready to meet it.

“No,” she says, “I’m ready to join it.”

Credits.

Stinger: We see Ares. “That was fun,” he says. A beautiful if bookish woman is with him, and seems bored by their conversation. She’s Athena. “That’s what you said after the Balkans. And the Gulf Wars. After every war.  But it’s over. Your attempt to create a perpetual conflict failed. Again.”

“This fight might be over. But the world just got a little smaller. And as the world gets smaller, humans more and more feel the press of their fellow rats in the cage, and the more they trample over one another, for resources and gain. No, sister. I think this conflict is only just beginning.”

Couple of side-notes

The Amazons speak several languages. Their original language was an offshoot of ancient Greek. But as outside societies changed, and the possibility of discovery increased, they learned others, to be prepared for the inevitable contact- and to better be able to stave off conflict. They’ve spoken English primarily since the Second World War, when it became clear that the US would dominate world culture for some time to come. Though a few of the older Amazons still speak German- they hedged their bets, just in case the Germans won the war.

Fashion-wise, I think it’s silly if they go the full on toga route. It would also be boring for them to just go full modern. Instead, what I’d like to see is kind of a fusion- basically a parallel evolution of fashion from a Greek-heavy beginning, but then only marginally influenced for thousands of years by occasional contact with the outside world. If designed right, it would be modern, but almost sci fi, but with a hint of their togic origins- but always with an eye to practical active wear.

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DCU Reboot Pitch: Aquaman

This is the third in a series of pitches for the rebooted DC Movies. I have thoughts about how to retool Aquaman to draw out the elements of him that are unique, and build out his own niche within the broader DC landscape, none of which include turning him into the most obnoxious dude in your frat (and you know from obnoxious- you were in a frat [I kid- many of my best friends are obnoxious]). But I’ll refer you to that explainer post for info on the whys and wherefores, and try to stick to narrative here.

We start on a beach by a lighthouse, an idyllic couple stroll as their child, three years old, frolics in the surf. Adult Arthur narrates, telling us he always took after his mother. They explore the coast, looking at crabs and creatures. She makes sure he’s gentle with the creatures, despite his youth. Arthur’s narration tells us he always felt a kinship to the oceanlife.

His father… saw in it a different kind of life. We see him fishing, the crazy, dangerous, storm-riddled fishing they make reality TV out of. But we cut back to the beach. Young Arthur is smiling, but his expression changes as the surf runs red. Sea creatures float to the surface, dead. At first, Arthur’s father doesn’t know what to make of it, but his mother does- it’s a message, written in blood, to her. If she doesn’t come home, and now, the bloodshed will never end. She walks into the ocean, and disappears, as Arthur’s father holds the boy back, knowing he can’t understand what he’s seeing.

Later, he takes the boy fishing, trying to teach him his trade. But Arthur is horrified, certain he can feel the pain and terror of the fish. His father is understanding, but it opens a rift between them. Arthur loves his father… but he can never look at him the same way. Still, he tries to raise the boy as best he can, spinning wild-sounding yarns of Atlantis. His parents ignite in him twin obsessions: ocean life and archaeology. The day Arthur goes off to school, his father waves goodbye, and walks into the ocean, the same as his wife had.

Arthur graduates with a doctorate in both obsessions he inherited from his folks. But the more he studies, the more he learns, the more he begins to believe that his father knew more about Atlantis than his tall tales would imply. He manages to trace some artifacts to dig sites, with still further clues. A jealous colleague publicizes that Arthur is hunting Atlantis, that he’s a fantasist, wasting the school’s money and threatening its good name. His funding dries up, just as he reaches the most expensive portion of his research: underwater excavation. Reluctantly, he finds an outside sponsor in Hyde and Seek, a family salvage company with a reputation for acquiring rare antiquities for the highest bidder.

The Hydes have been developing proprietary diving tech, exoskeleton diving suits that are both stronger and lighter than the kinds of wearable submarines usually used at depth. They’re basically Iron Man suits built around diving. These are 90% of the way to Black Manta’s eventually power armor suit, with the main exception being there are lights that shine from the eyes, but they don’t shoot energy- yet. There are only two of them, so Arthur is going into the water with the Hyde patriarch.

Their underwater drone finds a site right where Arthur expected, and the Hydes broach divvying up the spoils. Arthur tells the Hydes legitimate museums and collections will pay a finder’s fee- that they can have all of that- he’s here for the discovery. The Hydes pretend to accept, but once in the water the elder Hyde sabotages Arthur’s gear, so that his oxygen will deplete too quickly, and his gauge won’t read properly. Arthur is entranced by the find, seeing not just proof of Atlantis but proof that this is just a way station outside the greater city- that he’s nearly at the answers he’s spent his entire life seeking. Hyde, both impatient and concerned every second risks their find, severs Arthur’s oxygen line, and his suit begins to fill with water.

Arthur convulses, ‘drowning,’ before his eyes shoot open. He takes off his helmet, and touches the place on his neck where his gills are pulling in water to ‘breathe.’ Arthur swims after Hyde, cutting the distance with great speed, and sabotages the elder Hyde’s tank the same way Hyde sabotaged his, causing him to drop a container of treasure. He swims down for it, even as Arthur reaches out to him with his mind. “Leave it. Your oxygen is running out.”

“Screw you,” Hyde thinks, “I’m not leaving empty-handed.” Then he realizes he didn’t ‘hear’ it with his ears, but in his head. “How am I hearing your thoughts?”

Sea life swim past them, each with its own unique voice. “You hear him the way he hears us- all creatures, above and below, evolved from the oceans- and the oceans recognize their champion.”

Hyde still refuses, and picks up the chest. But he’s slowing, and we start to hear the slowed thumping of his heart. He gets about halfway back, before passing out. Arthur swims to him, lifting him to safety aboard the vessel, but Hyde is having a heart attack. His son attempts CPR, but to no avail. “What did you do?” he asks Arthur, but Arthur isn’t equipped to handle this moment; he tried, damnit, and being confronted with his failure so immediately is more than he can bear, and he returns to the water. To the autistic son, it looks like a cold-blooded murder- one that will fuel his rage, aided by the one red gem that his father managed to hold onto from the treasure hoard that will hypercharge Black Manta’s diving suit.

Arthur’s upset. He sits in the ruins, halfway hoping to drown. “I shouldn’t have touched his tank,” he lectures himself. “I was so angry.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” a Prickleback tells Arthur. “My neighbor, a usually gentle hermit crab, got surprised by a passing school of clown fish, and pinched me, and I got so upset I ate him. It’s the natural order of things; you shouldn’t anger someone big enough to eat you.”

“I… didn’t eat him,” Arthur says.

“Not in the sense of consumption, no. But you struck back.”

“Don’t listen to him,” a different hermit crab says. “According to him it’s perfectly all right to vent your frustration at anyone weaker. Not that I think you blaming yourself makes sense. Seems it was pure hubris that killed the diver.”

“I’m having a nervous breakdown, aren’t I?” Arthur thinks.

“Let’s examine that, shall we?” an octopus asks, floating in front of him. “While certainly this is a unique blend of circumstances, is it more likely you’re hallucinating, or that your perceptions are, indeed, authentic. Wait… you didn’t eat one of the purple cucumbers, did you? Those can cause hallucinations.”

“Only in cephalopods, you eight-legged snob,” the cucumber barks back.

“But the most important question, Arthur, is what do you want?” the octopus asks. “You can swim back to the land, avoid the water and sealife at all costs. Whether or not this is an hallucination, you can convince yourself of that. But is that what you really want?”

“I want to know the truth. About my mother. About my father. About Atlantis.”

“That’s a good lad. Come with me.” They proceed back to the chamber where Hyde tried to murder Arthur. The symbols on the wall, only a handful Arthur was able to translate with years of study, begin to be legible to him, with glowing English letters hovering over their Atlantean equivalents.

“How…”

“This language is ancient. It’s a part of the sea, and all the life that dwells within it. You could see it, just a little, even on land, just as you could feel who you were, even on land. But here, under the sea, you’re connecting with parts of yourself you never knew were there.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve lived here most of my life, hearing whispers from the other creatures about Atlantis, its history, its myths, and its champions. For every age, there has been one- every age but this one. Because you were lost, marooned on the desert surface. Until now. And I know you the way every creature in this ocean does. You are a part of us, of everything. You’re finally home.” As he says that, they crest the hill, and the magnificent city of Atlantis sprawls beyond them.

Arthur causes something of a commotion, because the ocean life are following him. And the Atlanteans can feel it, too. This isn’t just some random stumbling upon their home, they feel the same pull as the rest of the sealife towards Arthur, even if it’s more distant. And he, in turn, follows what he feels coming off of them, that he’s needed, in the city center.

Inside, Ocean Master is orating. He views the presence of the Hyde and Seek ship so close to their capital as the last straw. Man has been polluting the oceans, damaging the climate in such a way that temperatures are becoming far more volatile, and now they are seeking Atlantis herself. The time has come to reveal themselves, and strike. Half of those present rise and cheer. The rest are silent. But one of them in particular recognizes the stranger who swam in, and abandons her seat at the head of the opposition. She is Atlanna, Arthur’s mother. She embraces him, and feels in him something she knows the ocean has been lacking. She turns towards the Ocean Master, and gives a masterful oration of her own, lamenting that the time for action is here, getting some of the pro-war Senators on board, before the turn, where she says that they’re better than humans, more civilized. She suggests they send her son as envoy, to announce to the world that the oceans are inhabited, and deserve a place at the table; she tells them he is the oceans’ champion. Orm argues against it, but there just isn’t support for a first strike when the opposition leader is offering her son to sue for peace.

They hold a celebration of Arthur’s return- the once prince of Atlantis is home. Atlanna tells him she returned to try to save the kingdom, and for a time, succeeded. However, when Arthur’s father came to her, Orm threatened to have him exposed and killed; she gave up her kingdom to save him and avoid civil war. She tells Arthur not to trust Orm. She takes him to see his father, who is kept in a reasonably well-appointed cell- and we understand why when Atlanna joins him inside. He’s a prisoner, and she lives inside the cell with him. “I’d complain, but the food’s not half bad, and it’s got one hell of a view,” his father says, staring adoringly at Atlanna.

Arthur insists he’s not a politician, which is why she sends Mera, her right hand. The pair set off the next morning, planning to go to the United Nations and officially declare Atlantis a nation, and begin the likely arduous process of figuring out Atlantean territory on the world stage. They’re attacked en route by assassins, who torpedo their craft. With the help of a pod of whales, Arthur is able to destroy their ship, as well, though they manage to take Mera hostage, and keep her alive in the hopes of drawing him out.

Arthur is able to make it to a largely deserted island, where he’s able to use his understanding of historical warfare to craft some low-tech booby traps, and take out the assassins. Mera proves capable of freeing herself, and had actually remained a prisoner longer to continue to probe her captors for information, hoping for proof as to who is behind the attack.

Orm, meanwhile, is back in the Senate chamber where he presents ‘evidence’ that their diplomatic mission was attacked, that even attempts to hail the attackers and explain their peaceful mission didn’t dissuade their violence- because humans are just that bloodthirsty. Even some in Mera’s camp are willing to attack the surface, given that story- even if she refuses to believe her son is dead, or literally anything coming from Orm’s mouth.

Arthur and Mera arrive just as Ocean Master is about to lead the Atlanteans to battle. He’s still naive enough to figure that they can just pop up, and accuse Orm, and that will be that. She understands there’s a momentum to these things- too many people have hung their hats on the idea of war for it to just stop in its tracks. “We can’t stand by and watch innocent people die.”

“War is almost entirely innocent people dying,” she says solemnly.

“No. I mean I’m going to fight. If Atlantis needs to hit someone- I’ll give them someone else to hit.”

Arthur swims, alone, into the middle of Ocean Master’s march. He tells them all, telepathically, what happened. Orm speaks through his telepathy to them, too, denying his involvement. Arthur admits that his father is a human, and he was indeed raised among them. He knows the great and terrible things people do. But he is also Atlantean, and has seen one of them lie, and betray his oath, to secure more power. People, whether on the surface or in the ocean, aren’t good or bad because of where they live, or who their parents were, but because of who they are. He’s spent his whole life wanting to find Atlantis- he’d rather die than let Ocean Master risk either of his homes like this.

Ocean Master attacks, and reluctantly, so do some of the soldiers. But suddenly Arthur is joined by all kinds of ocean life. They’ve been rallied by the octopus; Arthur was risking himself, but the animals know that he is their hero, too, and what happens if there’s a war with the surface. “Protect the champion!” the octopus cries.

It’s a line, I think, to walk, because the Atlanteans are using weapons of war, but the animals don’t actually want to do anything but stem the loss of life, so you’d probably have kind of goofy attacks like dolphins teaming up to knock the ‘wind’ out of a soldier, then one of them swims off with their weapon. Ocean Master’s sea horse bucks him off, and I like the idea that something lands on Ocean Master’s helmet, and spends a lot of time there, both making him an ineffectual leader, and also ends up squirting some eggs on him.

I think the fighting ends when Atlanna arrives, and tells them to heed the wisdom of the ocean, and remember they are a part of it, “and not the ocean’s masters.” I think the fighting largely has ceased, by that point, anyway, since the soldiers are more annoyed and bemused by the animals. Arthur tells Ocean Master he has a little egg on his face, as he turns to swim angrily off.

Back in their congress, Ocean Master pushes for Arthur’s execution, as an enemy of the state, or at least, his expulsion. Mera leads Arthur’s father there, where he heckles Orm, as having had his son clean his clock the once already- then says it’s no way to talk to the rightful king of Atlantis. Orm stammers out that Atlanna renounced her crown. Arthur hears a voice he doesn’t recognize, but it’s old, and learned. “That’s not how I recall it.” Arthur is the only one who can understand the old squid, who has been with Mera always, as her attendant. But he is able, by concentrating, of projecting the squid’s recollections into the Senator’s minds.

The squid provides the ink Mera uses for all of her official duties, including, as Arthur’s father points out, their marriage certificate. Further, he was there the night Orm threatened the both of them, to expose their marriage, her ‘divided loyalties,’ that he could use resentment of the surface world to ignite a civil war, one that, win or lose, would deeply wound Atlantis. Her only choice was to abdicate, and he would promise no harm would come to them.

Everyone’s shocked, but Mera recognizes Arthur is going to kill Orm, and demands that the guards arrest Orm for treason. Atlanna raises a hand to calm the furor, after that, and assures them that whatever form of government Atlantis chooses, it will not rely on the divine right of kings and queens, nor on might making right.

Behind closed doors, she tells Arthur he could be king. He says he doesn’t want it. “The first mark of a good executive is not wanting the power,” she says gingerly, but she also tells him what he wants may not matter. She says ultimately Atlantis will choose its destiny- that their role is to shepherd it, whether from its battlements or seated on its throne. His father claps him on the back, and says he did exactly that for Atlantis, and the world, and they are both so very proud of the man he’s become.

In an end-credits scene, we see a team of marines take control of the Hyde and Seek vessel. General Wade Eiling and Amanda Waller are having a heated exchange. Eiling says the ship broke several treaties and maritime laws- he wants to play it heavy. Waller sees something in the boy’s eyes- sadness, but also rage. She plays a hunch, and they go inside to talk to the younger Hyde, cuffed in an interrogation room. “Arthur Curry stole your father from you. How’d you like a chance to gut him like a carp?” His eyes shoot up at Waller, full of anger, and we cut to black.

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DCNu Pitch: Martian Manhunter

Since the DCEU is rebooting, I’m pitching my own reboot here. I’ll likely continue on with my older pitches, too, but given that the Snyderverse is as dead as Kevin Costner’s Jonathan Kent (um, spoilers, I guess, if you somehow missed the first movie in the Snyderverse, but also still care about details from a 10 year old movie), my focus will likely shift to these. To differentiate continuities, the new ones will be given a DCNu tag.

I think I’m going to continue to ladle out details of my overarching plans, but I’m scheduling things to take advantage of the fact that we have a lot of well-known, even successful franchises and also a lot of question marks. By padding the more questionable stories between more known quantities, you aren’t going to accidentally derail the entire project if say Martian Manhunter doesn’t catch on with the public- because it might not, for the same reason that projects like “Black Adam” or even “Blue Beetle” might not.

Martian Manhunter

This will draw on the write-up I did for John as an Unsuck Hero, but will hew more towards narrative.

We start on Mars. The man who will eventually be called the Martian Manhunter is just called John. He’s preparing to leave again, and his wife is uneasy. For years he’s been on the trail of a White Martian terrorist responsible for igniting a civil war between Green and White Martians that’s still raging. John hopes that by bringing the terrorist to justice, the war can finally end, and their family can be finally safe. His wife shifts, her skin turning White. She’s afraid, afraid his efforts could see them targeted, afraid of being exposed as a White Martian, afraid for their son and daughter. John shifts into his uniform; it’s not quite the one we know, and is somewhere between that and the Oan Manhunters.

In this continuity, the Oan Manhunters spread as far as Mars. However, they were ill-equipped to deal with a civilization that had no spoken language or even body language, relying entirely on telepathy, and so recruited locals to interface with the population, which eventually became a Martian Manhunter Corps., essentially their police force. The Oan machines have since been recalled, but the Manhunter Corps. continues in the same tradition, even keeping the name for its protectors.

John’s wife is an extra skilled telepath; the Manhunters usually employ them for long-range recon, but because she’s a White Martian she couldn’t pass their security checks, so she scans for John under the table. She’s the one who found the terrorist, hiding on Earth.

Manhunter pilots a ship from Mars. He talks to his superior in the Manhunters, who tells him he’s going out on a limb, because there haven’t been any unauthorized launches since the terrorist was last seen on Mars. John feels confident, which leads to the superior probing for information on his CI, but John plays coy, saying only that he trusts the informant with his life- and the superior warns that he could be- John wouldn’t be the first Manhunter caught in a separatist trap, tortured for intel then set on fire.

John lands, and scans the local population for information on what they look like, eventually settling on a detective, blue trench coat with an exceedingly high collar and a hat (I think his eventual uniform will incorporate elements of this disguise and his Manhunter uniform; you could even give him a red vest and a red belt). The people in his immediate area are predominantly watching a detective movie on the TV, the lead played by the actor playing John, so when he makes himself look human, he resembles that actor (I’d probably have the TV version wearing some prosthetics, just so it’s not too 1:1, otherwise he’d be in disguise as relatively well-known actor- someone likely to draw attention).

We’re going to do a riff on a noir story, here. There’s a femme fatale waiting in his office, and she pounces on him, kissing him passionately. He pulls her away. “Shiera, I said this can’t happen.” She corrects him, that he said it can’t happen again. “I know what I said,” he says coldly. She softens, asks if things are okay at home. He remains cold, because he’s angry at himself, and snaps at her that he didn’t go back home for gossip, he went to find a lead- and he did. She asks if she should get her wings, or even call in her people.

He tells her this is his fight- that if his intel is good, he’ll call for backup- that it’s too dangerous a fight for her- or really anyone who isn’t Martian.

John can’t just scan for his target; the separatists have developed a method of hiding from telepathy, something that is strictly illegal in their society. But his wife’s scan puts him on the trail, and he’ll have to track him the old fashioned way. He finds an apartment the White Martian had been using, which gets him known associates, leading eventually to the discovery of the terrorist himself- unfortunately he ‘feels’ John at that moment, and runs, so John pursues him on foot for a fun little chase through the rain, before their confrontation.

Their fight appears to be a massive shapeshifting battle, until the terrorist realizes the entire thing is happening in their minds, that John is trying to limit the fallout and exposure to the native Terrans. The terrorist tries to lash out in the real world, but splitting his concentration just makes him vulnerable in his own mind, and John’s able to subdue him.

John stops back at his office to say goodbye, to Shiera, to Earth, to this whole assignment. Shiera doesn’t want him to stay gone, and tries to justify their affair, largely to herself; deployed so far from home, she has an agreement with Katar. John says he doesn’t have that kind of relationship, nor is Mars as distant as her home world; he understands how all of this is different for her, but he’s betrayed the woman he loves. Shiera is smart, though; she tells him some part of him felt betrayed by his wife. If it wasn’t for her White Martian heritage, for her ties to the terrorist he’s been hunting- his eyes flash red and she doesn’t finish.

On his ship, the terrorist teases John. I think I’d make them both rivals for John’s wife’s affections- that before she married John, she was in a relationship with the terrorist, finally leaving when his extremism and the danger that placed them in became clear. He reads John’s guilt over the affair, something John takes as a threat to tell her. “John, she has one of the strongest minds I’ve ever encountered. She already knows. She’s just waiting for you to be honest with her. She deserves at least that.” John says he doesn’t think he should be taking relationship advice from a terrorist. “Remember, I know her at least as well as you do.” John delivers him to a cell.

John confronts his wife with the truth of his affair. She’s… very understanding, all things considered. She knows their life together was never easy, but as the civil war mounted, she became consumed with her fear. She knew hiding her put a strain on him, but she could barely contain her own fears over their children. She left him alone in their relationship, just as surely as he left her on his missions. It’s not a justification, but she is keenly aware of their circumstances.

On Mars a psychic disease quickly becomes a pandemic. The infection pattern first makes the Manhunters believe it’s a deliberate attack, until they isolate it down to psychic contact with John’s prisoner- but given the nearly constant contact of Martian telepathy, universal spread occurs quickly. Most horrifically, the disease burns out the Martian host- literally using the Martian’s powers to set fire to the body, utilizing the species long-standing fear of their vulnerability to fire as the catalyst, taking over control of their shapeshifting to move their cells together to set them alight.

John’s wife starts to smoke first, but their son is behind her only a moment. John holds them, and their daughter, and as they burst into flames, he screams out.

We cut to later, John walking onto the planet’s surface. Every building has fire and smoke rising out of it. He flies to his headquarters, smashing through the walls and into the cell of the terrorist. At first the terrorist is confused, then reads it on John’s face, and says he would never do anything to harm John’s wife. Then he makes the mistake of asking John what he did. John flips out, and punches him a few miles, catching him even before he can impact the surface and tackling him into a mountain. The terrorist is grief-stricken in his own way, and as John hits him tells him how he got to Earth, that he was pulled there by a scientist, the same scientist who created their telepathic blocks, who was working with them on a weapon to kill Green Martians. He’s horrified at the realization that he was that weapon- that his hubris was used to infect his own people, too.

The only Martian population untouched by the plague are the separatists living underground in hiding- the terrorist’s people. John tells the White Martian that suspended animation is the only plausible cure- that he knows they have the tech, and the separatist agrees to safeguard his people while John deals with the double-crossing scientist.

John goes to Earth, to hunt down the man he now believes responsible. First he stops back at his office, and talks to Shiera. This is where we reveal that his daughter survived- though technically, while he raised her, she’s biologically the separatist’s spawn. He tells Shiera to protect Megan with her life, and she agrees to. After he leaves, Megan asks if she’s going to die like her mother and brother. Shiera tells her that according to her scans, both she and John have a subtle mutation- one she learned from him, that made them impervious to the psychic virus- but that they’re carriers, that the disease could mutate itself and attack them anew at any moment.

John tracks down our mad scientist. I know in my previous write-up I suggested creating someone new, but I may have a more elegant solution, here: the mad scientist is Vandal Savage. At first he tried to partner with the White Martian separatist, thinking he could use them as his own army of supermen, but it quickly became obvious that the White Martians viewed the Greens as their inferiors- that if they ever came to Earth it would be as conquerors. So he decided to wipe the Martians off the board completely, aware that he had an easy scapegoat in the separatist, and very little likelihood of blowback.

We cut back, to the White Martian using the machinery to put the rest of the White Martians into suspended animation remotely. He hallucinates John’s wife. She tells him to go into suspended animation. He’s worried that he might accidentally infect the other White Martians. She starts to burn in front of him; he tries to apologize. She tells him it doesn’t matter; she’s dead, he’s just trying to assuage his own guilt. “You don’t need to,” she says. “You didn’t do this.” He says he knows who did. We see a Martian ship launch, and cut back to John and Vandal.

They have a quick dust-up, but the nature of the fight changes when Vandal discovers John was exposed and survived, as Vandal’s curiosity leads him to ask questions even as he’s using a combination of science and magic to keep John (barely) at bay- and John realizes Vandal might be able to cure Megan, so she isn’t a ticking time bomb, and he starts counter-interrogating to that effect, and it starts to look like they might be able to come to some kind of agreement- until the White Martian bursts through the wall, his fury dwarfing John’s. A desperate three way fight ensues, John and Vandal barely able to hold back the White Martian’s assault. He’s hurt and confused by John’s intervention, cursing the fact that he’s the other last Martian projecting his guilt onto John for failing to save the woman they both loved.

“We are not the last,” John says, and telepathically connects the Separatist to Megan, and the antagonist drops to his knees, whispering his daughter’s name. “He lives, so she can.”

So now the White Martian is going to play bad cop with Savage. “You heard the Manhunter. You’re going to develop a cure, and give us two doses, which we’ll administer at random, so if your cure doesn’t work, or harms us, there will be one of us left to end you. And if it’s me, I’m killing everyone sharing even a single strand of your DNA- your line burned off the face of the planet. And the ones who knew you, remembered you fondly, they’ll die screaming.”

“I’m not sure it would be any great loss. Most of my children weren’t worth the hour it took to make them.”

“Not even Cassandra or Scandal? To say nothing of the fact that, by your own estimates, a full ten percent of the population bear some small part of you.”

“Okay,” John says, “I think he gets the idea.”

“So you’re the good cop, then?” Savage asks.

John spins on him, predatory and alien. “I am a father. You killed one of my children, and the mother to both. And the authority that might have checked my anger died when you killed my world.”

“So you’re both terrorists, now?” Savage asks with a smile. “No judgment. I’ve been on the weaker end of a conflict; you use the tools you have at your disposal. Your proposal is acceptable. And…. for whatever it is worth, I, too, have been on the losing side of genocide. I am truly sorry to have given you that pain.”

After they leave, John tells the White Martian Megan isn’t getting either dose- they’re going to synthesize it and test it on the White Martians in suspended animation. The Separatist bristles, at first; but John points out two things: one, they’re not using their daughter as a guinea pig, and two, the White Martian survivors survived only because they were terrorists hiding out. He offers it as their penance- that as far as he’s concerned they’re still at war, and the war ends once the White Martians ensure it is safe for them to be released from their suspended animation.

“The other option,” John says, “is that the war continues. That you and I fight, here and now, and if I win, I’ll put you into suspension with the others, and I’ll ensure you never wake up.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“My mind is open. Tell me I’m lying.”

“You would.” He stops. “You’re right. Not about all of it. With Savage we have to be strategic… and I couldn’t be the reason Megan lost her father, too.”

John flies back to Megan and Shiera. “I need to tell you something, something your mother and I hoped to tell you together one day. About your father.”

“I’ll… make tea,” Shiera says, as an excuse to leave.

“The only thing I’ve ever needed to know about my father was that you loved me.” She grabs onto him. “You kicked his ass, right?”

“I did. But things have changed. You and I are the last Green Martians, and the only White Martians who survived were terrorists. I’m sorry. I hoped to give you a better, safer world.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “It just means I get to help you make it, instead,” and shifts into a female version of his costume.

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Unsuck Heroes

I’ve decided to write a new series of essays taking a character that sucks and making them not suck, or at least suck less. This exercise is, honestly, less about the characters under discussion, and more about understanding why they suck, and how to make your characters suck less.

Caveat: Every character has its fans. I’m not interested in arguing whether a character sucks. I’m not even saying any character sucks, actually. Think of it more like characters, over time, drifting farther from what made them interesting and unique, and growing barnacles and crud on its hull.

Yes, the boat metaphor isn’t a coincidence, we’re going to start with Aquaman. There have been many attempts to make Aquaman not suck. In fact, almost every Aquaman story in the modern era has been an attempt to make him not suck. Now, I’m not knocking on the creators who have worked on him; frankly, given their caliber, I’d be a fool to. I think, in fits and spurts, they’ve likely succeeded… but also, none of these have really stuck. So I want to think long and hard about why Aquaman sucks, and really do a full tear-down.

1) Aquaman talks to fish. So did Nemo, and the Little Mermaid. It’s not that he talks to fish that sucks. It’s how it’s been used. But let’s get one thing straight. He isn’t talking to fish. He’s commanding the goddamned ocean as its king. The movie version did this by making him command a leviathan… which is okay for your climax, but I think what Aquaman needs is to use some knowledge. The sealife he has access to is a toolbox, essentially no different from Batman’s utility belt or Superman’s powerset. He should regularly have at hand an entourage to handle the day to day. He’s s superhero sovereign, so there’s always a lot on his plate. You’d obviously want a shark, sure, as his enforcer, but you’d want some electric eels, an octopus for stealthily getting into and out of tight spaces. For giggles I’d have them all named for historical pirates.

2) Aquaman is just a dude whose dad boffed a fish. I’m not one to judge, and maybe you can say there’s some shared common ancestor not that far back down the evolutionary chain… but that sounds a lot like trying to add a romantic subplot into Congo with the sign-language gorilla. All kidding aside, this puts Aquaman squarely in the ‘chosen one’ category of protagonist, who by luck of birth has powers and -abilities. And that usually sucks (it’s the reason Harry Potter is a more bland character than Hermione). This fix here is more extensive. Arthur’s mom disappears when he’s just a boy. His dad raises him to be a fisherman, working on a boat. Arthur doesn’t like it. There’s a brutality to fishing that disturbs him, and he swears when he stares into the fish’s eyes, right before the cleaver impacts, that he can feel their fear. His dad raises him on tall fisherman’s tales, some mythological, but some… feel more real. They’re stories from his mother. Arthur eventually gets a dual doctorate, archaeology, and marine biology. He embarks on a quest to find Atlantis. His colleagues mock him, and his funding is pulled at the last minute, making him desperate enough he goes into business with the Hydes, who he suspects sell stolen antiquities. They find some of the ruins he originally mistook for Atlantis, and they sabotage his dive gear, intending to keep the spoils for themselves. Instead, he discovers that he can breathe underwater. He sabotages the Hydes’ equipment, enough they can make it back to the surface, but not with any of their spoils. Jesse Hyde refuses to leave empty-handed, and he runs out of air before reaching safety. Arthur discovers that he can feel the minds of the sealife around him, and through them finally decipher the ancient Atlantean language he had only been able to understand pieces of before. This leads him to the true Atlantis, still a thriving underwater metropolis. He uses his knowledge and burgeoning abilities to retake the throne from the usurper Ocean Master, and become Aquaman. So yeah, Indiana Jones with a knowledge of the oceans that rivals Batman’s knowledge of criminal psychology… I think that works.

3) Aquaman is just a suckier Superman, powers-wise. This one honestly kind of stings, because it’s… pretty true. He has strength, and durability, just not as much. Which is fine. In some regards, Wonder Woman is just a slightly less powerful Superman. But it’s also fixable, and Grant Morrison opened the door. He said that Aquaman was durable because he needed to be able to survive at the deepest ocean depths. I think I’d lean into that, that he is the ocean’s chosen champion. It’s not just that he’s king of Atlantis. It’s that he’s meant to represent all of the ocean’s denizens, designed to protect them in all of the corners of the Earth’s waters. So he can swim fast enough to be able to shoot through the air like a flying fish and land in any land-locked body of water. I’d give him some kind of underwater propulsion; simplest might be that he can essentially suck water in through his gills and shoot it through the bottoms of his feet, though aquakinesis is also a possibility, but he should be nearly as fast on water as Superman is on land. I’d probably even lean into his weakness, that he has to stay hydrated, but that his body is pressurized, so that he’s essentially carting around a ton of ocean water at a time, which he can release in jets of water. He still wouldn’t be able to beat Superman one on one (except maybe in a prolonged battle at the darkest depths of the ocean where Superman’s photovoltaic cells couldn’t recharge), but the ways his powers worked, and the things he could do would be more interesting and unique to him.

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DC Cinematic Universe Reboot Pitch: Superman

So, in my last post I assumed that Warners wasn’t going to throw out the baby with the bath water… which turned out to be foolish on my part- but I also think it’s the right call. And since the DC Cinematic Universe is getting a reboot, I’m going to pitch my own reboot slate.

And… I’m this late in updating because I haven’t been able to stop writing these out as full pitches since I started. It looks like I’m writing full pitches for these things. Apparently I pitch for a living now- except where that implies anyone pays me to do it.

And now, these pitches are going to be illustrated through the “magic” of CG art. It’s… going to be a wild ride.

Superman

It all starts with Superman- as it should.

I’d start him at a crossroads, in college at Kansas State. His parents always wanted him to be able to have a quiet, private life. That’s why they’ve always asked him to help in quiet ways. They know their boy too well to think he wouldn’t help at all- but he needs to be careful, so he can have a normal life. To that end they’ve wanted him taking agricultural studies, along with mechanical engineering courses that would help him maintain the equipment on the family’s farm- it’s easier for him to remain anonymous living in Smallville.

But he’s always been drawn to the world. This gets supersized as he moves from Kansas State’s distance learning program to their Manhattan, KS main campus, in a suburb of Metropolis. He’s dating Lana Lang, but she’s still living in Smallville, attending a fashion school online, and their relationship is stretched paper thin.

He rooms with Pete Ross, who he hasn’t seen since High School, but they’re friends. Pete’s something of a big man on campus, and shows Clark the ropes. Clark needs electives even if he stays with his parents’ plans for him, and selects a journalism class; he talks it over with Pete, and justifies it as a lark. Pete sees through him, but also knows that expanding his horizons will be good for him.

He’s also got another friend from Smallville, Lex Luthor. Lex is actually hurt that Clark decided to room with Pete; he’s always been jealous of their easy friendship. Lex struggles to be kind, really, to be human; he’s typically the smartest man in the room, and was raised to believe that the smartest man should be the one everyone else is listening to. He’s wealthy, and flashy, and whip-smart, he’s liked, and respected, but not loved.

On Clark’s first day in his journalism class, students pair off to interview each other. Clark gets paired with Lois Lane. She feels she’s slumming it at Kansas State, but when her father transferred to the nearby military base, it seemed the only way to stay close to her family. She starts calling Clark “Smallville” almost immediately. Clark is smitten, and his hopes crash as she’s greeted by Lex, who introduces her as his girlfriend. “Whoa,” she slows him. “I’m still feeling that out.”

Back in their dorm room, Pete chastises Clark for forgetting about Lana. He checks his watch, and has to run, literally jogging off campus, and once he’s out of sight, running at superspeed back to Smallville, where Lana’s waiting at a diner. He arrives just as their food arrives- she ordered for him, his favorites, and he’s distracted enough not to recognize that she’s upset. Finally she blurts out that the distance isn’t working, and he’s her best friend and she doesn’t want to lose that, but-

He stops her, and takes her hand. “You couldn’t.” This is really the first moment we really see Superman in Clark. He’s gentle with her, kind, hopeful. Then he cocks his ear, and she asks if he has to go. “For a second.” He’s a blur, but back basically before we can blink. She tells him it’s a shame he never goes slow enough for anyone to see that suit- it’s some of her best work. She asks him what it was this time. “Semi’s breaks went out on the highway.” She asks if he could hear that. “I can hear radio waves. He was calling for help on his CB.”

“You never stop amazing me.” She kisses him. “What is wrong with me, letting a guy like you go?”

“Nothing at all. I’m just not what you need right now. And I’ll always be here for you.” He’s a blur again.

“Except when you’re not?” she asked. It’s mostly flirty, but there’s an edge of sadness to it.

“Hey,” he says, and puts an arm around her, and she curls into his shoulder. “I’ll always come running if you need me.”

“You better. I’ll kick your ass if you stop being my friend.”

We cut back to the campus. Lex is excited to be spending time with Clark, and also excited to be able to show off both what he knows and what his family’s money has bought for the school. He’s leading him through a new advanced robotics lab. “Then why is it part of the health sciences wing?” Clark asks.

“Showing those second-day ace reporting bonafides?” Lex teases him. He pulls back a curtain, to reveal a man, Corben, in a hospital bed. Clark’s empathy goes into overdrive, and he’s not sure he should be seeing this. Lex ignores him, tells him they’ve paid the man for this privilege, and then some. He’s terminal, cancer is killing his body. But using an exotic mineral as a power source, they’ve built him a robot body. The metal skeleton is suddenly behind him, and pinches Clark’s shoulder as the lead container in the chest rotates, exposing the kryptonite at its core. Clark passes out.

He comes to a moment later. Lex was concerned, but plays it off teasing Clark for having swooned at the surprise, saying that kryptonite is only very lightly radioactive- not much worse than standing near a microwave while it heats your dinner.

Lex tells him the skeleton they’ve nicknamed “Metallo,” because it’s made of metal, and they… may have been doing 2am Jello shots while brain-storming. But the robot, aside from its power source, isn’t all that impressive; it’s stronger than most of the competitor bots, but it’s iterative. The revolutionary science is the interface with Corben’s brain. The machines he’s hooked to are currently downloading his brain… but it’s a lengthy process. There’s concern Corben won’t survive long enough for them to complete the transfer.

To that end, the university has agreed to an earlier-than-planned test-flight of Lex’s new experimental passenger jet. It made it all the way to Stockholm to pick up the world’s foremost ontological surgeon, and is bringing him back as they speak. And in a bid to impress his ‘girlfriend,’ Lois took a seat aboard the maiden flight, in the hopes she might actually let them be official. Lex gestures to a board full of complicated aeronautic formulas. Clark frowns. “Shouldn’t this be inverted?” Clark asks. Lex stares a moment, dumbfounded. Clark’s right, and a roomful of graduate students either missed that, or were too timid to correct Lex’s mistake. “It, uh, reminded me of a question from my trig, class. I got a C- in that one.”

The horror of it dawns on Lex; that mistake means the jet is about to have a catastrophic failure, and if it left on time, it will happen any moment. He excuses himself to make a call.

Inside the cockpit, we hear the pilot’s mayday as Lex tries to break through to warn them about the error- but the damage has already occurred. Clark, wearing his Superman suit, manages to right the plane. Since both its wings are damaged, he has to fly it in, allowing Lois to take a picture of him- a picture she crops to remove his face- but she sees him clearly.

The next day, Lex is furious. Rather than talk about the experimental jet he successfully flew, or the cutting-edge surgical and scientific breakthroughs he made possible, the campus is abuzz about a Superman who saved Lois- and her story on the school’s blog is the reason why.

Clark has breakfast with Lex and Lois. She’s increasingly cold to Lex, in part because he’s throwing something of a tantrum. He worked for nearly a year, and in an instant was upstaged by some fluke of nature. Lois, meanwhile, is asking genuine questions of Clark this time, wanting to know about ‘ma and pa’ and even Smallville. Clark keeps trying to deflect to Lex, who knows his parents, and came from Smallville, but Lex is obsessed, and Lois isn’t interested in either his obsession or his perspective.

Eventually, Lois breaks things completely off with Lex, and starts pursuing Clark aggressively. It comes to a head when she confronts him. “I will sleep with you, right now, if you admit you’re the Superman.” Clark’s eyebrows go up.

“That must prove it, right? Because what kind of man could resist that offer? We must not be the same person.”

“Flattery, Mr. Kent? Or are you just trying to get to me another way?”

He stops for a moment, before becoming more serious. “I don’t want to play games with this,” he admits. “You’re beautiful, intelligent, and… kind in a way you usually hide from most people. I would love to have a relationship with you, Lois, but not one based on the factors of my birth. If that’s the only reason you’re intrigued-”

“Of course it’s not, Smallville,” she taunts. “But I can understand the pattern, so let me address that. I… spent time with Lex because of his potential; he could be a great man. Not because of his wealth, or his family’s connections, but because he has such capacity for compassion and kindness and good. But he was what my mom described my father as when she met him, a lowly private in the Army- he was a project. You’re the kind of man Lex could be, if he’s lucky, if he’s works at it. Lex was someone I could make into my equal. You’re… already pretty close.” She hangs off him, playful, but alluring.

“That you’ve got a secret does make you extra intriguing,” she adds. “That you’re humble about your potential to the point of absurdity… I want to know everything about you.”

“But can I trust you?”

“Ouch.”

“How can I know I’m not just another story to you, or that you won’t get bored and decide to write the story later on. Put another way, would you trust you?”

“Point. And no… but I think you know better than me. I think you trust better than me.”

He bites his lip, a cat with a mouth full of canary. “I can also hear your heartbeat.”

“I’m trying to decide whether that’s romantic or creepy.”

“It’s just a tell. Not the only one, but the most simple, obvious one. But I can pretty much known when someone’s being deceitful. And you’re not.”

“Then say it, and you can have me; Lane’s don’t Welch.”

He leans in close, and whispers, sensually, “No.” Her shoulders slump. She’s disappointed, and not just because she wants to hear him say it. “If you and I are going to have a relationship, it will be based on trust, and affection. Not bargains.”

She kisses him, passionately, halfway expecting that to change his mind, and a tiny bit hurt when it doesn’t, but she plays it off. “I’m holding you to that.”

We cut to later, Clark eating with Pete. “You’re a stronger man than me,” Pete says.

“Only barely. The way she smells.”

“Oh, I know. It fills the room after she leaves.”

“I don’t just mean her perfume. Her shampoo, deoderant, and the way they mix with the scent of her skin oils and sweat…”

“Okay, you are dangerously pent-up. Like, I’m worried you’re going to kill me in my sleep with a ballistic wet dream.”

“It’s… taken care of.” Pete… wants details, but Clark waves him off because he has a call. It’s Lex, asking to meet him later. He does. Lex has been drinking a little. “Should I be trying to catch up?” Lex shrugs.

“I hate you, a little, for how effortlessly better than me you are. You caught my mistake with the plane- and you’ve been too polite to mention it, even to me. It took me three months to convince Lois to get lunch with me- as friends- and in three weeks… she’s never looked at me the way she looks at you. No one has ever looked at me the way they do at you.”

“Lex… people aren’t an equation you can solve. You can’t input time, or even the right gestures, and output success. People feel, and they need. Be there for their needs, and their feelings, and people will see you the way I do- they’ll look at you the way I do.”

He hugs Lex, and Lex wants to hate it… but he doesn’t. “I hate you a little more for this, and because you know how much I needed it. How do you always know?”

Clark pats him on the back, and releases him. “It’s not so hard. People tell you what they need. You just have to listen enough to hear it.”

“You’re my best friend. You… don’t have to reciprocate it. I know I’m not yours.”

Clark shrugs. “I remember coming home crying the first month of school. Lana told me Chloe was her best friend. And you know what my dad said?”

“No idea. My father would have backhanded me and told me to toughen up. I don’t know what human fathers do or say.”

“That sucks, Lex. But my dad, he hugged me, and said, ‘Don’t worry about who your best friend is, or if you’re someone else’s best friend. Just concentrate on being the best friend you can be, and all your friends will be lucky to have you.’”

“That’s corny as hell, even for a Kansas farm boy.”

“Some of the truest things in life are, Lex. We all make our own families. You’ll find yours. I’m sure of it. And they’ll be lucky to have you.”

We cut forward. There’s a tornado. It knocks out power to the school. Lex is there, because they anticipated this, and even assembled some local press to try and make a meal of it. “It’s okay,” he says calmingly. “We knew this was a possibility. That’s why we’ve got the generators online.” Their backups come on, and the lights come back on. “Fingers crossed there isn’t a surge-” The power goes out, and Lex and the other students work to try and keep Corben stable. One of them is on the line with the power company. A student tells him they’ve got about an hour of juice on the batteries. The pour company say it’ll take at least 90 minutes. Lex knows that five minutes after life support fails Corben will be braindead. “Start the transfer into Metallo. We’ll increase the read speed.” A student argues that they won’t get reliable data. Lex grabs them. “In an hour John Corben is going to die. I can’t prevent that. But I can try to save as much of his mind as we can.”

Lex looks over his shoulder, at an empty chair with a handwritten card on it for Clark. Lois is sitting next to it, and notices, goes to comfort Lex. “I’m sure he’ll make it.” Lex acts like he doesn’t care. “I’m sure he’s safe.” Lex makes a joke about Clark getting made President of the tornado if he got caught up in it, and her smile, for a moment, makes him forget Clark.

We cut to the tornado. Superman is pulling things out of it, cars, fence slats, cows, a drunk out of a port-a-potty, “I think I had more to drink than I thought… really need a shower,” he says through the downpour.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this Superman is a cyclops, and his ribs are protruding out of his shirt, but it’s progress.

We cut back to Lex in his lab. One student is talking about the progression of the transfer, into the high 90s, while another complains that the data they’re getting is corrupted. Around 98%, the power dies a final time. They light flashlights. Lex spurs them to keep moving- they planned for this, and they know just how traumatic it will be if Corben wakes up in a metal skeleton. They’ve got synthetic skin, molded to look like Corben pre-cancer, that they need to stretch into place. They finish after about an hour, and one of the guests ask if they’ll wake him up. Lex says that he is awake, but that his operating system is defragmenting his mind, a process Corben will likely experience as dreaming, since that’s the human equivalent.

Corben’s eyes open, vaguely glowing green. “It doesn’t hurt,” he says. “In fact… I don’t feel anything.”

“No,” Lex says. “We’re looking into touch-sensitivity, but that advancement’s several generations away. We talked about that.” Corben is confused. His mind doesn’t work the way he thinks it should. He feels hungry… but is told he can’t eat. His ex-wife attended the procedure, but he’s distressed he can’t smell, can’t feel the warmth of her hand. She’s also stand-offish; they’re friendly, but he doesn’t seem to remember she’s his ex. Everything feels alienating. He claims to need air, and accidentally tears a door off its hinges on his way outside. “He actually doesn’t,” Lex says to the reporters, “but it is quite an adjustment. If you’ll excuse me.”

Corben is having a full-fledged freakout when Lex gets outside. He doesn’t understand, doesn’t remember what he agreed to, and how much Lex might have been coloring outside the lines. Lex is trying to play to the crowd, how much this advancement could mean to all sorts of people, but Corben is becoming increasingly unstable and violent, eventually smashing a car so it folds like a hard-shell taco. The gas in the car’s tank explodes, sending a spray of metal shrapnel that shreds Corben’s synthetic skin. He screams, flinging the remains of the car into the air, where it’s caught by Superman.

They engage, fighting, as Lex tries to get to the failsafe and shut Metallo down. Lex accidentally manages to open the kryptonite compartment, and Superman falls to his knees. Lex realizes that it’s having an outsized impact on him, and grabs a fire extinguisher from inside and smashes it into Metallo’s chest, sending flecks of the rock scattering- but the extinguisher blocks the rock enough for Superman to rally, holding Metallo while Lex shuts him down. The pair collapse into the mud. “This doesn’t mean I hate you any less,” Lex says, but helps Superman up off the ground.

“You’ll come around,” Superman says, but the way he says it, it’s full of warmth and cheer- he’s not full of himself, he’s just full of hope, for both of them, and their friendship.

Clark and Lois sit down to talk. She reveals that she sticky-fingered all the phones and cameras during the chaos, but that he’s at a crossroads. He can’t be Superman and fly under the radar- if he’s going to keep saving people, someone is going to get pictures to the press. She doesn’t think he can stop- he wouldn’t be who she thinks he is if he could. But she tells him, he also can’t do the most good if he goes back to Smallville- and for what it’s worth, she read the article he wrote about Corben for their class- he’s a talented writer. She’d publish it on the school blog in a heartbeat.

“How do I disappoint my parents?” Clark asks.

“If you want to do it like me? Do it with gusto. And some light shoplifting. But Clark… no parent who could have raised you into the man you are could be disappointed you turned out this way. You have to know that.”

“You’re probably right. I’m selling my folks short.”

“Folks, Smallville?”

“You can take the boy out of the country, but you’ll never get all of the country out of the man.”

“How? How can you say things like that without making me want to hit you?”

“I think it’s the way I look without a shirt on.”

“That helps. But… it’s here,” she touches his chest, and unbuttons his shirt, revealing the “S” shield of his suit.

We fade, but we’ll fade back in, a month later, on a similar shot of the “S” shield, but this time it’s on the front page of the Daily Planet, under the heading, “Man of Steel Sits Down for First Interview” with Lois Lane’s byline. Clark sets the paper down.

“I’m really proud of you,” he says.

“Of me? It’s your story. You could have told it, probably better than me.” She ponders a moment. “Well, you couldn’t; it’s not who you are. It’s not about the prestige for you, or the career. But this could could have been your byline. Maybe it should have.”

“No. Because I wouldn’t have known the right questions to ask. I know who I am, but that doesn’t mean I know what other need to know. That was all you. You deserve this.”

“I used to dream about seeing my name on the front page of the Planet; they offered to hire me, even without finishing my degree.”

“Oh,” Clark’s surprised by that. “What’d you say?” He’s bracing, because he thinks he knows where this conversation goes.

“It’s my dream job.” There’s a sadness in her voice, enough we start to worry Clark’s right. “That’s why I need to be able to do it right. If they want me because I’m right for the job, they’ll want me in a year, when I’ve graduated. Besides. I couldn’t leave you alone here. They’d eat you alive, Smallville.”

“My hero,” he says, and kisses her, and this time we really do fade to black.

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DC Ten Year Plan

Introduction

For those of you who may not have heard, James Gunn and Peter Safran, new heads of DC’s movieverse, are putting together a ten year plan. So I thought I’d pitch my own.

Assumptions

1. We’re playing it where it lies. That means no rewriting 2023’s The Flash to get rid of Ezra Miller, or assuming he’ll be killed in the final five minutes (he might be… but that’s a much easier thing to fix in my pitch than the reverse).

2. Budget is now one of the names of the game. So we’re a lot less likely to see the kinds of big-budget ensembles I prefer for my comic movies, (as you can tell from my other pitches). But I still expect team-ups and duos to be the norm.

3. Covid makes some movie failures an open question. WW2 could have been a winner at the box office, even if it wasn’t a great movie. For that reason I expect sequels to be greenlit that wouldn’t otherwise (you wouldn’t normally do a Suicide Squad 3 after that kind of a box office drop… but the pandemic creates this odd uncertainty- so I expect sequels to happen if only to keep the talent happy).

4. We’re assuming none of these balls get dropped, which is a big assumption. No one expected Black Adam to thud quite as hard as it did; it was supposed to build out the Justice Society, but it won’t get a sequel, and I suspect the Society won’t get a spin-off, either, at least not in its current state.

5. I’m assuming 3 movies per year. I know next year will have 4, but I think that’s entirely because DC blinked and moved Aquaman off of Avatar 2’s weekend- no reason to give up $100+ million just to play chicken with Disney- maybe a lot more, if Avatar is well-received and Aquaman isn’t. I expect 3 movies is the max DC will try to do on average; anything else risks glutting the market and stretching their producers too thin. It’s possible that changes; if they can consistently produce 3 per year without major duds, they might step up to 4… but I suspect savvy executives would recognize Marvel’s quality has slipped somewhat due to Feige being stretched thin, and try to avoid that.

6. I’m assuming we stop at trilogies. Marvel are experimenting with Thor 4 and Cap 4, but that happened later; for now we’re assuming after trilogies that things evolve.

7. You could read the statement about not having 4 Batmen as meaning literally that… but I think it points to a collapse of the multiverse- a Crisis on Infinite Earths as dictated by corporate fiat. Which we can work with.

TWIST

Given that reports have put Wonder Woman 3 as getting the ax, Momoa being out as Aquaman and Gunn rebooting Superman without Cavill… it looks like they’re aiming for more of a tabula rasa than I initially assumed. Because my procrastination is an onion of infinite leaf, I will still pitch my original version below, and then also pitch a wide open, blue sky version after that here. Honestly, I think a clean slate is the way to go… but I’m frankly a little shocked Warner/Discovery are moving ahead with it.

2024

I figure this is kind of a rebuilding year. So I’m only pitching one project, the only one I think has a chance of getting greenlit and made in time to come out in the same year as Joker 2.

Wonder Woman 3: War of the Realms

I’ve seen the reporting. I don’t believe the sequel is dead; the first one made $800 million, and the sequel suffered because of the pandemic. So it’s getting a sequel, and it’s one of very few projects that might make a 2024 deadline at this point.. To me the main question is whether or not Patty Jenkins will be involved. The next is whether or not they want to recast Gal Gadot- which is far riskier (most people don’t know Jenkins, but they know the actress in the role).

I think 1984 got made largely because after the first one blew up, Jenkins had too much clout. They thought the Wondertrain could never be derailed, so they might as well keep milking prequels, and if it ever did, you could just start making modern sequels. I think it’s time to pull that rip-cord.

This one takes place in the aftermath of Justice League. Wonder Woman has come full-circle, rejoining the world as well as now essentially leading the League. So it’s going to involve at least a little of her role as part of the world. I’d lean into it, make her ambassador from both Themyscira and also from the Hall of Justice- so she represents her people and the Justice League to the United Nations. That also neatly sets up an arc for her, in that there’s bound to be tension between the League and her nation.

The other big narrative thread we have lingering is Steve. She needs to get over Steve. Personally, I prefer the Frozen route; she’s the world’s premier superheroine, so it’s not great if her movies are all about the boy she likes (and we can’t even lean into her sex-positivity of the first film because she’s been portrayed at this point as being an emotional shut-in after Steve’s death). So I’d introduce Artemis. I’d make her literally Diana’s little sister, bratty, brash, spoiled and snotty, in all the ways a second child to the perfect first can be. She’s also incredibly hurt that Diana abandoned her, and the Amazons.

Perhaps that’s why, when there’s a minor territorial scuffle with Atlantis, Artemis fans its flames into outright war. Now, obviously, this sequel would be more financially viable if you get Momoa as Aquaman. But you could also do Mera, running Atlantis in his stead while he attends to League business, perhaps settling up a cool, strange superheroine cat fight. Or you could have it be Orm, Black Manta, the bench of, “briefly took over Atlantis to cause trouble” villains is reasonably deep (this pun is intentional).

Regardless, it becomes clear to everyone, the Amazons and the world, that she can’t both be their ambassador for peace and a part of the world’s unofficial superhero justice department. She has to choose. I’d have her speak to Athena (because again, the Gods are real in her world), and the Goddess of wisdom says that she can be a true and faithful sister to her people- or she can embrace the world as her people, and be faithful to them, and leave rule and representation of the Amazons to those without a foot in both worlds.

So she helps put an end to the conflict, first, then resigns as the Amazonian ambassador, because she can’t be both a peacekeeper and a peacemaker- and her heart and her skills are more in the one than the other. And at the same time she reconnects with her love for her sister- with her love for all of her sisters- and realizes that at some point Steve became a symbol for the loss of all of them, as well.

2025

The Batman 2: Hush

I’m assuming Matt Reeves maintains largely full control, but I can’t pass up a chance to pitch some Batman, and it’s taking up space in my schedule, anyway, so loosely tracking the comic story, in the same way that The Batman loosely tracked a few different stories; Joker is treated like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs in the original story. We could go a step further, keeping him in shadow for most of the runtime. That would allow us to, if Joker 2 makes anywhere near what the first did, have a cameo from Phoenix, canonizing his Joker as the post-Flashpoint Joker (or at least one of them). Because we’d need Dick around, and because I think the idea of Robert Pattinson trying to foster a child would be funny, one of the segments of the story involves the death of the Graysons and Bruce taking Dick in- then immediately realizing he’s an emotionally stunted adolescent, and in no way ready for a kid.

The Suicide Squads

Sequel box office is usually a referendum on audience enjoyment of the previous film; it can be helped by marketing, but only so much. People were intrigued by Squad 1, then let down, so they were less keen to be bit a second time- even by a superior product. But this superior product was also the baby of the new boss of DC, or at least one of them, so I expect it to get a third entry.

I assume James Gunn would be writing and likely directing this one himself. As the name implies, it’s Squad 1 vs. Squad 2. Amanda Waller re-recruits her first squad to go after her rogue squad, headlined by Redemption Tour Will Smith. She wants them dead or back on her leash, and their leverage destroyed. How can you not salivate at the idea of Deadshot vs. Bloodsport, King Shark vs. Killer Croc, Harley and her Spear vs. Kitana and her Kitana? It might even be fun to do Ratcatcher 2 vs. Enchantress.

Given the casualties 1 suffered, we could either add characters. My preference would be to recruit Clayface, but a brainwashed Clayface who believes he’s Steve Trevor, and that he’s been serving as a deep cover black operative since his ‘death,’ with the aim of eventually putting him and Wonder Woman together for some emotional fireworks. Or you cold just have Peacemaker show up and join their squad. Either way, 2 is outmatched and things look dire… until Harley cashes in a favor from the Birds of Prey! Waller is lead away in cuffs (handed off to General Wade Eiling), and Task Force X is officially disbanded, with both squads freed.

Of course… that just means Waller and her special project go deeper underground… but that’s a concern for another day.

Green Lantern Corps.

Not to be confused with my more pie in the sky version I pitched before, this would be smaller.

Given that Ryan Reynolds was essentially doing a variation on Guy Gardner’s personality, and I’m assuming we’re going to be doing this as small-scale as you can do something like this, we have two human main characters, and they’ll be John Stewart and Kyle Rayner. John’s been around the block, and Kyle’s the rookie.

We play the GL Corps. almost like a police department, that kind of bureaucracy, codes of conduct, etc. Assuming we want to make this as cost-effective as possible, we can do it almost like Men in Black, that there’s essentially a sector house stationed on Earth, that they work out of. The front office is staffed by humans, or at least shapeshifters and humanoids. As they get deeper in, their coworkers get weirder. Then John leads him into an interrogation room.

Stewart tells him they’re at war. One of their own, Sinestro, has been recruiting. Their rings run on willpower. Sinstro’s runs on fear. His theory, the same of many petty dictators, is that fear is more powerful than will. And Kyle’s there because, right now, they’re losing that war, and doesn’t want to talk about what happened to Hal. He asks Kyle to tell him how they got there.

Kyle was a graphic designer. Mostly freelance. Hard to keep a single gig going in this economy. Between gigs he liked to station himself at a coffee shop and sketch, to keep his design skills limber.

A Sinestro member crashes through the shop. Kyle’s slashed with a piece of broken glass. The Sinestro is blasted by green light, and we see that he landed on a Green Lantern. It holds out its ring to Kyle, and tells him to take it- take it and run.

We see Kyle running down the street as yellow energy flies past him. Someone vulnerable is frozen in his path, a child, maybe a stroller or an elder person. Kyle turns, the ring clutched in his hand, and holds up his arms and closes his eyes- he can’t let someone else get hurt because of him.

We’re back in the interrogation. “For the record, that blast would have incinerated both of you. For the same record- I’ve never seen a civilian activate a ring, let alone one they were only holding.” We’re back. Kyle opens his eyes, and sees the green bubble he created. The Sinestro starts to punch it, and the bubble cracks. Kyle tries to reinforce it with his mind, a flurry of motion as he imagines intricate defenses, but they’re too weak to hold the creature back, it’s going to break through.

A green burst of energy knocks him down and back, and Stewart lands in front of Kyle. In the interrogation room, Stewart asks for the ring, and says they can’t be taken. Kyle says it was given to him. “Be that as it may, the odds of you getting it to work again are astronomical, and even if you do, you won’t have a way to recharge it. Unless I swear you in.”

They talk about what joining the Lanterns means, and eventually has him repeat the oath after him, then has him slide on the ring, and he transforms into a Green Lantern.

We meet Sinestro. We’re going to do something different, here. The Sinestros are mostly working on Earth. They’ve taken over a Central American cartel- converting some of them with rings, killing others. They did this for access to their chemical processing and networks. And the reason is that they’ve partnered with a human with expertise in creating fear chemically, Dr. Jonathan Crane, and they intend to use his chemicals to amplify their strength a hundred fold and crush the Green Lanterns, first on Earth, but eventually on Oa.

So you can do a lower key, earth-based crime story with the Lanterns for a lower budget, but with the promise of potential space-based chicanery to come- but depending on box office you can keep the action mostly Earth-based- so it doesn’t have to be a Star Wars to justify sequels.

2026

Flash 2/Earth 2

I’m assuming that with as risk-averse as WB-Discovery has been, they don’t want to keep Ezra Miller around. In light of that, I expect they’ll recast- maybe a cameo of Ezra, but replace him, maybe with Wally from a different universe, the future, whatever.

So at the end of Flashpoint (I’m assuming they keep him through that- if only because they want him around, at least theoretically, for press), Barry emerges on Earth 2. At first he doesn’t understand it- he’s never emerged in the wrong universe before. We play up the similarities between this world and the Snyderverse, hinting hard in promo material that Flash will actually be returning to Snyder’s DCEU.

I’d honestly keep that going as long as possible. Flash is captured by people who look a lot like his Justice League… only they aren’t. And they’ve also captured another Flash, a Wally West. He came with his Barry here, summoned by some kind of mad science that pulls those in touch with the Speed Force there. Because this Earth is dying. It’s a wrong Earth. They want to use the Flashes to escape it before it’s destroyed.

The two Flashes are able to escape together. They have a conversation at superspeed, Wally at first thrilled to see Barry, before the realization hits him- he isn’t his Barry, which means his Barry really is dead. The Crime Syndicate are just behind them. Barry realizes they can’t both get away- and sacrifices himself so Wally can make it out- because I’m a sucker for the classics, I’d have his death happen like it did in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Suddenly Wally is our lead.

He’s found by Lex Luthor- this planet’s greatest hero. They team up with a heroic version of the Joker, called the Jester, to destroy the stolen LexTech that is drawing Flashes. While the Syndicate were distracted looking for their own way out, Lex evacuated the rest of the Earth- but he and Jester stayed behind to make sure the Syndicate didn’t follow- or escape to some other unsuspecting Earth.

The pair fall fighting the Crime Syndicate, and Flash both manages to destroy the Flash lure, and escape back to Barry’s original timeline. If we can wangle the cameos, Flash goes to the Justice League. Most of them just assume he’s Barry. But Batman sees through him. He waits until the others have given them distance. “You aren’t Barry. Just who the hell are you?”

Aquaman 3: Return of the King

I’ll assume James Wan (or at least his bank account) are pissed at the cancellation of The Trench. But that was a silly idea- an unbranded Aquaman spin-off designed around… Black Manta? But there’s no reason the concept, and the production design has to go to waste. I’m assuming from the synopsis that it’s Black Manta Aquaman will be teaming with in 2, otherwise he would be the main villain here. If he’s in 2, then we’ll swap in Charybdis… and we’re going to do a lot of foreshadowing about severed hands- but we’re probably not going to chop off his hand… no matter how big of a fan of the Evil Dead movies I am (though if we do, we aren’t giving him a hook- we’ll give him a turbine hand). But if we do do Charybdis… I’d have him claim to be the rightful king of the seven seas, with the Trench’s legions at his back to enforce the claim.

This would be, overall, a much darker story. The creatures of the Trench have been riled by a new leader, promising that their old foes, the Atlanteans, the Amazons and the Lost Kingdomians can no longer hold back their strength. And… they win, around the halfway mark. The terrible creatures of the Trench overrun Atlantis, which is forced to evacuate, half of their forces going to Paradise Island, the other to the Lost Kingdom. I’m just… going to assume that Arthur’s arc is accepting his role and responsibility as Atlantis’ ruler, which means Atlantis falls in part when Arthur refuses to lead, expecting the generals and army to handle things. He fights with them, even at the head- but he is not their figurehead.

I’ll assume including Aquaman, or at minimum Aquaman elements, in Wonder Woman 3, will have both cemented a connection between the two places, and helped juice box office. So I’d say the reverse would work here, and also, Wondy sort of owes Arthur a return of the favor. The Amazons sustain casualties as part of the evacuation, leading Diana to lead the Amazon forces. She’s a natural at it, something that awes Arthur (it’s one thing to command seven heroes, another to command an army and a nation without breaking stride). She gives him the tough love pep talk he needs, inspiring him to be the leader Atlantis needs. As part of that he pleads to let the Atlanteans take the first line- they were beaten back, but not broken. They need to reclaim their dignity nearly as much as they need to reclaim their home. The Amazon generals are reluctant; if their front line doesn’t hold their defenses overall weaken- the Atlanteans could lead to the fall of the Amazons if they can’t hold long enough. Arthur is adamant they’ll hold. He gives his warriors a Braveheart speech, and they drive the Trench warriors back into the sea.

They continue the fighting all the way back to Atlantis, and retake the city. Atlantis’ generals argue for driving them back into the trench, then mining the cliffs; that will close the passage, and collapse the trench, killing most of them, and sealing the rest away. But Aquaman, during the evacuation, saw some of Atlantis’ worse-off, those left behind by previous regimes, and sees the parallels. At first he resists, and the generals press harder, assuming, from his inexperience, that he can be cowed, until finally he bellows, “No. They are angry because we have, again and again, made them lesser. We are not their betters- we are their brothers. I am not the king of the beautiful parts of the ocean, I am king of the seas, and they are my people, too.” So Arthur sues for peace, and with a little humility, is able to end the conflict without bloodshed, reuniting the two kingdoms under his rule.

Shazam vs Black Adam

Yes, this essentially functions as Shazam 3 and Black Adam 2, and is probably the smart bet whether or not Shazam 2 is a breakout sequel. Black Adam is one of his big antagonists; one of the other two is a telepathic caterpillar… so I’m going with the one played by the Rock (although I now desperately want Vin Diesel to voice Mr. Mind at some point).

Now… I’ll admit, I haven’t seen Black Adam yet. I don’t know whether or not he retakes his country in that film or not… but that’s a minor detail, because that’s how this movie begins. He remakes the ancient city-state of Kahndaq. This bugs the crap out of Shazam, because people assume it’s him, because they both have a lightning bolt chest. I just imagine Zachary Levi, exasperated, telling an old woman he saved from being hit by a truck and is now beating him mercilessly with her purse pointing to a TV in a shop window bearing news footage of Black Adam rampaging, telling her, as she hits him, “I look nothing like the guy. I have hair. And a cape!” She starts swinging underhand, and while the swing goes off screen, we can tell she’s whacking him in the crotch. “Stop that,” he says, catching the purse.

Shazam convenes the rest of the Marvel family. They discuss; most of them argue for cooler heads; but Billy’s really struggling, here. He wanted to be like Superman, but he’s becoming, “Thanks for saving me, I guess, but screw you, man!” So Billy goes off on his own to fight Black Adam… and has his clock pretty thoroughly cleaned.

I imagine there’s a lot of comedy to be had, excitable Zach Levi trying to convince Black Adam that his relatively naïve and idealistic morality is superior… and Black Adam just really not having any patience for this child in a man’s body.

The Marvels arrive to rescue Billy, and they start to have a big superhero fight… before Billy realizes the damage they’re doing, and all to salve his ego. He realizes what’s really important- the little people, the ones who can’t stop tank shells. Billy convinces the Marvels to stop fighting.

Just then, the warlords Black Adam took Kahndaq back from, counter-attack, seeing the Marvels’ intervention as an exploitable crisis. And they’ve upped their game, getting some magically infused tank shells that actually do hurt him. Billy recognizes that the warlords are the worse of the two evils, so they team up with Black Adam.

At the end, the Marvels tell Adam to leave Kahndaq alone. “No.” He tells them the only way they can pry his home from him is with a war that will level the country- and he knows they wouldn’t do that.

Billy’s angry, but recognizes Adam has a point. “Today, you’re the lesser of the evils. The day that changes, I’m dragging you out of here myself.”

Now… if Shazam 2 is a breakout sequel, you might be able to get money enough for a Justice Society cameo. Say the tanks, given that they’re specifically designed with Shazams in mind, could be a problem for all of our heroes… until the Justice Society show up to help out. This could foster good will with the Marvels, and pave the way for Shazam to continue as a part of the Justice Society.

2027

Justice League: Dark

Okay… this one is wild, even for me. It starts as we’d expect, Constantine, Zatanna, Swamp Thing, and Tim Hunter, dealing with a magical threat. Because I’m trying to save Justice League movies the way Marvel does for Avengers events, and Wonder Woman’s series ended at 3… she ends up here, to add some star power to the line-up. The magical threat ends up shunting them off into a different DC Universe- essentially a thinly veiled Snyderverse. Something is deeply wrong with a world where Batman is gunning people down on the streets from the safety of his own personal tank. Flash (paralleling Ezra Miller’s real-life problems) is having mental crises faster than anyone can think up solutions. Superman, after the death of Lois Lane, is going full-on fascist. So the characters are caught in this dark, increasingly dystopian world, and have to figure out if they can save it, and if they can’t, whether or not they can at least escape it. Depending on how it plays, this could lay the groundwork for Injustice Lords or the Injustice universe. This exists both because the concept has been a high priority for adaptation, and because elements within WB/Discovery really want to bring back the Snyderverse in some capacity, and presents an opportunity to have your cake and eat it, too. When they finally escape, the end up in the Batcave.

The 3 Jokers

Okay… assuming everything is going to plan, we need to square why we have 2 Jokers running around, and also multiple Harleys. So here’s how we do it, by roughly adapting the 3 Jokers story. Phoenix has a run-in; depending on whether or not a Batman shows up in Joker 2, it can just be with police or a rival mob. Harley saves him, narrowly. She’s concerned for his safety. So they hatch a plan to create more Jokers. He starts experimenting with psychoactive drugs on people they kidnap.

One will, eventually, be the gangster version from Suicide Squad.

This also involves Batman, who at the end of the story captures the Joker, and puts him in Arkham- where he is in Hush.

Personally, I’d also make the original Joker the only one aware of the shifting timelines, first after Flashpoint, then after Wally takes Barry’s place (time rewrites, so that Wally was always their Flash- Batman seems to be the only one who remembered Barry).

Blue Beetle 2: Justice for All

Similar, but distinct from my Justice League: International pitch.

Assuming Blue Beetle does well, it will likely in part be attributed to it catering to the Latino audience in the way that Black Panther’s success was partly attributed to the underserved Black audience (and given the success of Coco is likely a savvy move). So the next logical step is to put him on the International Justice League. Wonder Woman resigning her post as dual Amazon ambassador and Justice League ambassador leaves the UN feeling vulnerable. She’s still their liaison, but in effect it has made the League more independent. So they request the right to build their own League, an international one that can cater to the world’s needs, not just whatever the gods among them deign to intervene in. Some of this is prompted by Russia fielding their own hero team, the Rocket Reds, think a team of Russian Iron Men, and China their own. The world is getting nervous.

Given Blue Beetle has already had one success, and he’s both an American with Latin American roots, he’s viewed as an ideal candidate to lead the team. We want to be as international as possible, so I’d bring in Fire from Brazil, Ice from Iceland, Vixen from somewhere in Africa, Dr. Light (Dr. Hoshi version) from Japan.

I’m thinking a goodly portion of the story is assembling the team, finding and convincing them to work together. Then a crisis occurs, as the Chinese superteam and Russian one combine forces to take over Mongolia, with the stated aim of dividing the country between them. Just as the JLI are about to go fight the good fight, their new handler, Max Lord, pulls Beetle aside. They’ve been waiting for this eventuality. They had warning. From a visitor claiming to be from the future.

He’s been kept in a bunker, a UN safe house that’s essentially its own little Gitmo in New York. Beetle goes to the heart of it, and meets Booster Gold. He told them three things would happen, and two have come to pass. The third is the combining of the Russian and Chinese teams. He’s told them that without him, the conflict will escalate to a full-scale nuclear war. As part of his intake, Max asked Booster why a man from the future would let them catch him. “You’ll let me out. When you need to.”

So the JLI fight the combined forces. They’re tough, but the JLI prove tougher… except Booster stops them. He knows the Russians and Chinese can’t lose face like this- if they can’t compete in the next arms race, they’ll rattle their sabers in the old one… but their fear will lead to launches, and nuclear devastation. But the real truth is they aren’t the aggressors here. Someone is pulling their strings.

There are a lot of directions you can go from here. Any number of telepaths, mind controllers, etc. Whoever it is, I’d make their plan a part of the Anti-Monitor’s plan, meant to soften the Earth up so it provides less resistance- in the same way he guided Sinestro to Earth to weaken the GLs, and eventually Oa. Despero might be the best option, because he can both control some of the characters, but also provide a good boss fight at the end.

Booster’s future tech is able to detect the hidden adversary, and he attacks them, freeing the 3 super teams to fight together and end the conflict.

2028

The Batman 3: Knightfall

I’m pitching this one as much because I get the sense that Reeves just kind of wants to play with all the toys, and this would let him put his imprint on whoever was left. Bane cracks Arkham wide open. This sets up a gauntlet for Batman, who has to capture as many of the inmates before they hurt innocent people as he can. All the while, Bane keeps taking shots at him, to weaken him more and more. But unlike prior, crappier adaptations… Batman doesn’t get his back broken. You could do that in the comics and spend a year on that storyline. But for a film, even a 3 hour one, that makes for a lousy story. So instead… Batman figures out Bane’s plan. It takes a toll on him, true. But he prepares for the moment Bane’s going to attack him, and puts Dick Grayson in the costume; he’s been champing at the bit the entire movie, wanting to help while Batman held him off. It’s for this moment. Bane trashes Dick. He’s brutal, and with the venom Dick can’t win. Bane hoists him over his head, and we hear the sound of a bataring whip through the air. It doesn’t stop Bane from smashing his knee into Dick’s back, but it does cut him off from his venom supply. The real Batman emerges from the shadows, and beats Bane, who slices open his veins to jam the venom line directly into his arm. This fight’s harder, but Bane gets tripped up by Dick from the floor, and Batman knocks him out. Batman asks Dick if he’s all right. “First thing they teach you in the circus is how to fall…ow…”

Green Lantern Corps: Parallax

The Green Lanterns managed to beat Sinestro. As he’s being transported to a launch facility for escort back to Oa, his convoy is attacked. It’s part of a series of raids and attacks the Lanterns are dealing with from a terrorist group calling themselves Parallax. They’ve been targeting Green Lantern support staff and allies, those without rings themselves, bombing their cars, their homes. Energy signatures at the crime scenes indicate presence of both Sinestro and Green Lantern rings- leading to paranoia about who among them have turned, causing Kyle and John to not be able to trust anyone.

What takes them longer to understand is that the terrorists are also targeting remainders of Sinestro’s cartel. This is somewhat hidden, because they take their rings after death, a missing finger being the only indication there was ever a ring there to begin with.

The leader of this ring-powered terrorist organization turns out to be none other than Hal Jordan. He blames both the Green Lantern Corps. and the Sinestros for the destruction of his home town of Coast City. He’s holding Sinestro prisoner, and using his ring as part of the attacks as he makes Sinestro watch his empire crumble.

Kyle and John find and free Sinestro, but are caught by Hal. They prove incapable of defeating him, until Sinestro puts his hand on Stewart’s, adding his will to John’s ring. Together, the three are able to forcibly extract Parallax, the fear entity, from Jordan, and he’s horrified about what he did under its influence.

Sinestro testifies in Jordan’s defense, telling them that under the Parallax entities’ control there’s very little a host can do to resist, that while he certainly aided the entity willingly, Jordan did not.

Batgirl and Supergirl: World’s Finest

We’re at the point where extrapolating from what is to what could be gets… interesting. Because I’m trying to pull together what nearly got made as a gauge of corporate interest… despite management changes wildly altering that interest several times over.

But presumably, there’s confidence in some kind of a Batgirl project. We’re also, if we’re building towards a Crisis, going to need a Supergirl. So I figure combine the two. Give it to whoever the current equivalent to Juno-era Diablo Cody is, maybe Emerald Fennel.

Kara Zor-El arrives on Earth. Jor-El sent his brother on the colony an identical ship to launch Kara, and he did so. But her ship was damaged enroute, and had to use orbital sling-shotting to arrive at Earth. Because she spent more time at near-light speeds, she incurred more time dilation, and Clark’s older cousin is now his younger cousin.

What neither of them know, however, is that the Kandor colony didn’t suffer Krypton’s fate. They were bottled at the last minute by Brainiac… but he considers the city incomplete, given that one survivor managed to escape. He tracks her to Earth, intent on shrinking her down as part of his collection.

Meanwhile, Batman tasks Batgirl with being Supergirl’s handler. He figures she’s good at blending, but can also protect her in a pinch. This leads Batgirl to training Supergirl to fight; she’s only absorbed a small amount of solar radiation, so she’s a lot more vulnerable right now than she will be.

I’m assuming it would kill the budget to actually show the Justice League, but we could have a news broadcast showing that the League, including the entire Hall of Justice, has been frozen in a solid block of ice. The ice seems to be mildly radioactive, so attempts to break free would spread radioactive dust across the city- Batman confirms to Batgirl via radio that the isotope is Kryptonite, that someone knew about the League and how they would be vulnerable. Batgirl doesn’t think it’s a coincidence this is happening right after the arrival of Supergirl.

Their paranoia proves correct, when both girls are kidnapped and brought aboard Brainiac’s ship. He largely ignores Barbara, thinking her to be a human, and of absolutely no consequence, casually threatening her before ignoring her completely to monologue at Kara. Batgirl manages to break the encryption on Brainiac’s computers, waging technologic war on him as he tries to fight Supergirl. It’s a tough fight, since she’s still mostly relying on the self-defense Barbara taught her. Eventually they force Brainiac to flee, and get into an escape pod back to Earth.

2029

The 3 Flashes

Wally keeps getting shunted to alternate worlds. Whatever the Crime Syndicate did, it continues to pull him from reality to reality. He meets another Flash, an older one, named Jay Garrick. Garrick postulates that, as Hawking theorized, there’s a cosmic editor, putting things back to where they were, fixing impossible paradoxes- that the multiverse is trying to send him home.

Both Flashes get pulled to another dark timeline. During their down time, Wally reflects on his Barry, and how he was the better hero, and he would be able to save them. Jay tells him that he was one of the first heroes on his world- he didn’t have anyone to look up to- he had to be the hero he wished he could look up to- and just as crucially, learn to forgive himself when he fell short of that ideal.

They’re met by one of the Monitors. He explains that his people are ethe editors Hawking theorized- that when a tear in reality threatens all existence, they fix it.

This dark reality, however, is actually the future, or at least a possible one, run by Eobard Thawn, the Reverse Flash. His connection to the Speed Force is artificial. He created it with technology, forcing himself into it. He can only maintain that by draining the life of other Flashes, recreating tech created by Lex Luthor to do so. So presuming that Reverse Flash is the antagonist of the first Flash movie, this serves as his origin.

So we get a pretty wild superspeed fight, during which Zoom absorbs enough of the Speed Force to have a legit connection, leading to him going back in time to attack Wally (accidentally attacking Barry, due to the continuity bending that attack created).

The Monitor appears at the end, sheepish over having used them. Reality is safe, for the moment… but they’re also a step closer to a Crisis point. Because the existence of Monitors means the existence of Anti-Monitors, anti-matter, opposing forces from the dark multiverse. They feed on matter, converting entire realities into energy- and one has set his sights on their Earth.

Justice League: Dark Multiverse

Justice League Dark thought they were home- thought they finally found their own universe. We start in the Batcave, where the last film ended. Batman tells them that he’s glad to see them, he could use their help. Joker’s won. He united all of Gotham’s villains under his banner, killed half the police and forced the remainder to disband. With the help of a mysterious, ragged stranger, he erected a magical barrier that’s keeping Gotham separate from the other heroes. Worse, he systematically killed all of Batman’s allies, all his Robins, Batgirls… he’s the last one left. Now he’s executing parents. Every hour, on the hour, he’s killing parents in crime alley, orphaning their children. He says the only way he’ll stop is if Batman kills him. He’s been up for days, at this point, trying to figure out a way to beat Joker. He’s a shell of a man, but he’s terrified that if he kills Joker, he’ll never stop. He knows Joker’s a singular threat, but how do you justify drawing that line? He already crippled Joker… but he still won’t stop.

Wonder Woman offers to do it. He reveals that he knows Joker has a failsafe, that he’s secreted a more virulent version of his toxin in his body that will transform whoever kills him into him. Batman is just a man- he can be beaten- but a Joker with the power of Wonder Woman might not be.

Batman’s plan is to wage an all-out assault on Joker’s compound, hopefully long enough to distract the ragged man and let them remove his magical bubble. They barrier is pouring from a giant bat totem, and is protected by dragons with the Joker’s face. They fight their way to the barrier, as Batman fights his way to the Joker. Batman tries all kinds of things, but he just can’t outmaneuver the Joker. Turns out the Joker isn’t even there, he’s doing all of this by remote. But there is a teleporter, that takes Batman to him. They’re locked in a cage, with a minute to go before the next parents die. They’re related to some member of the Batcast, and the resemblance shakes him. He tries to find a way out of the cage, some way that he can escape after he kills the Joker, biding time, hoping the Dark League can manage to bring down the barrier in time to let the League rescue the family. They only need a second, a fraction of a second, for Flash or Superman to arrive. We watch the clock as he tries desperately to escape, with seconds left. We cut back to the Dark League, destroying the barrier. They realize the ragged figure is behind them, and in a haunting voice he tells them, “Too late,” before disappearing.

We cut back to the cage with Batman and the Joker in it. We can see that the timer stopped, and the family is still alive. We pull back, to see the cage is filled with gas, and the Joker, his neck snapped, hangs limply from Batman’s hands.

An instant later, Superman is there, about to punch a hole in the cage. “Don’t,” Batman says. “Can’t risk you getting exposed to this gas.”

Now… dependent on budget, I’d have the full League and Dark League with him in the cave, still sealed inside the cage, running diagnostics on him. He seems to be fine, and convinces them that he feels fine, and that if they’re going to counteract the poison he needs to be out there, with his equipment. It’s Superman who makes the call, because he’ll always trust Batman. The second he’s out, Batman activates the Babel protocol, countermeasures for the entire League as he systematically murders his way through them. He hadn’t planned on the Dark League being there, and being magic, they survive him a little longer- long enough to open a portal away. But he hitches a ride, coming through with them back into their universe (though that fact will only be revealed in the end credits).

Lobo

The Main Man takes a contract in a hive of scum and villainy. Seems that someone’s special captive got loose. She’s armed, extremely dangerous, and hiding out on Earth. During their first fight, she kicks his butt. Badly. Embarassingly so, to the degree the he never even manages to peel her out of a cloak. The last thing he sees is red glowing eyes.

In their second fight, he bushwhacks her, having finally read the brief provided by his employer. This time he brought kryptonite to the party. For a moment we’ll assume he’s after Supergirl… and you’d be half right- he’s caught Power Girl. Now… to try not to give you a nosebleed, but also tie her into the multiversal shenanigans we’re building up… she is originally from an alternate Earth. However, when her rocket managed to shatter through to a different universe, the Monitors rewrote her history, to be a clone of Kara created by her parents in the bottle city of Kandor to replace the daughter they lost. During the fight in World’s Finest, a little of Earth’s radiation managed to break through into the bottle city, giving Kara enough power to escape, vowing to marshal forces to free them all.

Lobo returns to Brainiac with his prize. Brainiac notices something amiss, and accuses Lobo of playing a fast one. Her signature is wrong… but she is genetically the Kara he was seeking. He deems it worthy of further study, then turns his attentions to Lobo.

See, Lobo is the last Czarnian, a worthy addition to Brainiac’s collection. He captures him, and houses him in a place he doubts very much Lobo will want to escape from.

It is a civilization consisting entirely of prostitution, gambling, liquor and cigar production. Lobo’s eyes light up, and we fade to black. We put up white text. “Fifty black-outs later…” Lobo is drinking alone. An alien prostitute makes a pass, but he’s melancholy. It’s a world catered entirely to his whims… except for his lust for violence and conflict. He’s getting restless. Even tiny, Lobo is able to crack his bottle. But once free, he realizes that without being able to fly, he’s not going to be able to make himself big. On the one hand, that means he can get hammered for pennies. On the other, it means only insect hookers for the rest of his days. He decides to bust out Power Girl. They make an uneasy alliance. She grows him first. He considers reneging, until she starts smacking him around as a superstrong fly- which should be very comical to watch. Finally he grows her. Lobo takes the shrink ray and the bottle he was trapped in. Kara takes the bottle city of Kandor.

I’m assuming Kara had been searching for Ray Palmer, the Atom, to help her try to regrow her city. He tells them that the cities have been shrunk too long; Brainiac’s tech can be reversed over a short period, but after that regrowing becomes impossible. But he promises to keep searching for a cure.

2030

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths

The World Forger has been a busy little bee, creating a nigh-infinite multiverse. Feeling slighted that less attention seems to be paid to his dark, anti-matter universes, the Anti-Monitor devises a plan to consume the positive multiverse’s energy and usurp the World Forger, creating only dark universes.

With each destroyed universe, the Anti-Monitor becomes stronger, leaving the heroes with a single possible path to win: merging the multiverse into a single reality. They manage it, and then beat back the Anti-Monitor. Supergirl and Jay Garrick die in the offing.

Brianiac reports on the failure of the Anti-Monitor. Darkseid smiles. Brainiac doesn’t understand. “We exist beyond any universe While the wall between his realm and the universe remains intact, there is now a crack, through which we may directly influence events. Desaad proclaims, “Darkseid is coming. Darkseid is.”

Beyond

I mapped out three phases, the first ending in the Crisis, the second in defeating Darkseid, and the third ending in a fight with the Dark Knights.

Supergirl would have survived, encased in Kryptonian crystal and eventually revived by the Legion of Superheroes. The New Gods would have lost to Apokalips, as would the Greek Gods, before Darkseid laid siege to Earth

Batman would have paid Lobo to form the Outsiders into a nonlethal black ops team from remnants of Task Force X, who would eventually rebel against him, not realizing his plan was to convince them to use nonlethal means, not keeping them as Waller had.

Next

I’m going to work on my own DCNu movie universe, mostly because I’m jealous Gunn and Safran got that much leeway. Could take me a couple of weeks, but check back soon.

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MCU ’22 Pitch 12: Warlock & The Infinity Watch

The Deal: I pitch movies set in the Marvel or DC cinematic universes. Also other things. This pitch follows on directly from Nova 2, which is a direct sequel to my Nova 1 pitch.

Warlock & The Infinity Watch: Taking place after Guardians 3. I’m assuming, for the moment, they won’t be decimated, and will co-anchor this movie with Warlock and Captain Marvel; even if they take casualties, whoever survives can be in this.

We start on Vormir. Red Skull is devastated. We think he’s talking to the embodiment of death. He’s upset that Steve Rogers is gone- he’ll never be able to kill him. That he could have been content to be a specter, so long as the possibility that he could one day torment Rogers existed. But now… he has to just let his hate die. And what is the Red Skull without his hate? The soul stone falls into his hand. He wasn’t speaking to death at all, but a Kang variant, who may need a universe with infinite stones, but doesn’t mind him using one in the interim (really, he’s expecting Red Skull to soften the universe up for him).

Adam Warlock, and I’m making educated guesses, here, but he’s largely a good guy. He shows up on Earth, shortly after the events of WandaVision. We see her studying the Darkhold, but when there’s a knock on the door, she comes to it in a wool shirt with a mug of cocoa. She doesn’t know Warlock, but his golden skin is striking. “Wanda Maximoff. I am known as Adam Warlock.”

“Oh, um… I don’t really train people in the mystic arts. But I probably have the number for Dr. Strange, if you’d like to come in.” (Yes, this scene is set before the events of Dr. Strange 2)

“I’m not here for that. I’m here with this.” He holds out one of the infinity stones, and she reaches for it. “Aren’t you concerned it could harm you?” He’s somewhat taken aback by her haste to seize its power. “Or that its great power might corrupt you?”

“It doesn’t seem to have harmed you, and my powers came from one of the stones. I always assumed I was immune to them.” Adam reads her aura.

“There is a darkness in you, Wanda Maximoff. You cannot aid in my quest, and I would beg you, to abandon your own, for it will rend your soul in half.”

“Could I use it?” She asks. “I see you, now. I know what you are. And I could no more take the stone from you than survive ripping loose the energy of the sun. But if I could hold it, for a moment. I could bring them back. I could give my boys life again, and make Vision… make my family whole again.”

“I’m sorry, Wanda. You are not whole, and while that remains true, you will be unfit to wield an infinite stone- and unfit to reclaim your family.”

“You bastard!” she unleashes a blast, but Warlock is already gone, flying at speed away from the Earth.

He makes it as far as the atmosphere before Captain Marvel collides with him, hitting him so hard he impacts on the surface of the Moon. They fight, briefly, before Warlock puts up his hands, realizing she isn’t a threat. “I mean you no harm, and, I believe, you mean but to protect your homeworld. There is no reason for violence between us.”

He explains that his cosmic senses allowed him to notice the reintroduction of the stones by Kang, and he means to protect them. However, he has a darkness in himself, one that cannot be tamed, and certainly cannot be trusted with the stones. So he needs others to safeguard them in his stead. She seems worthy, if she would stand by him. She accepts, if only so he’s not carrying two stones alone anymore.

She also mentions knowing a crew that might be able to help- people who have stood for the galaxy when others did not. “I would be eager to meet such heroes,” Warlock says.

“I… wouldn’t call them heroes, exactly…”

Needle drop, in a colorful corner of space. Drax and Groot are staring out the window at space. I’m going to assume by this point Groot is back to an adult floral colossus. “I do not understand, tree,” Drax says dryly.

“I am Groot.”

“I have never heard the contradiction of sentient life more poetically expressed.”

“He got that from a fortune cookie,” Rocket says, shoving between them.

“There were cookies?” Drax asks, walking towards the cabin.

“There were,” Nebula says, and pops the last one into her mouth whole.

“You’re eating the fortune,” Peter says.

“Why is there paper in my cookie?” she asks, pulling it out of her mouth.

“Mine wasn’t worth anything; let alone a fortune,” Rocket says. “Just some human gibbering.”

“The fortune’s, it’s a saying, something philosophical, or portentous,” Peter says.

“I saved you one,” Gamorra says, tossing it to Drax. He catches it, and crushes the cookie in his hand. He removes the paper, then crudely mashes the dust into his face.

“Thank you, assassin.” His fortune, which he drops but which we linger on, says, “Your daughter is alive.”

Drax takes one of the containers of food, and begins to shovel into his mouth with chop sticks. Suddenly the ship lurches.

“We hit something?” Gamorra asks.

“Hit, no,” Rocket says. “But if you want I can gun the engines.” Rocket points where Captain Marvel and Warlock are floating just on the other side of the ship’s windshield.

They walk through the forcefield in the rear of the ship. Warlock is less impressed, since he’s met the Guardians before, and expected… more. They get to talking, and it turns out they’re all headed to Knowhere. The Guardians are uneasy about assembling the stones. Isn’t that just making the job easier for the next Thanos? On the other hand, if the Infinity Watch train in the use of the stones, and coordinate, it’s likely the next Thanos wouldn’t be able to take them at all.

They fly to Knowhere, or what’s left of it after Thanos’ fight with the Collector. Oddly, the stone is back with his collection.

Next they travel on their ship to the wreckage of the realm of Asgard. I honestly kind of like the idea that the battle between Hela and Surtur continues in the background- a permanent Ragnarok on an increasingly small chunk of rock (alternately, as in my unrelated Thor 5 pitch, Hela could go to Hel and take over).

They find Beta Ray Bill, who found one of the remaining weapons from Odin’s vault (essentially the prototype for Mjolnir), which granted him Thor-like power, along with an infinite stone (unless of course either Hemsworth or Portman Thor want to guest- contacted by the Guardians- and then we’ll bring in Bill for the sequel/credits).

They go to Xandar. One of the stones is there. Red Skull finds the second stone, and begins to wreak havoc, using the two stones he possesses to transform the locals into his minions. As set up in the credits scene from Nova 2, The Nova Corps, led by Richard Rider and his brother Sam, are looking for the stone, too, leading a Nova contingent. They hold Skull off long enough for Warlock and the Guardians to arrive. He can hold back any one of them, even using the stones, hitting Peter Quill so hard he drops the stone he was holding, which is picked up by Richard Rider. The heroes without stones hold back the possessed Xandarians, while the four watchpersons, Warlock, Captain Marvel, Beta Ray Bill, and Nova, attack him as a team, essentially hitting him one after another in a round. Finally, they join hands, channeling the stones together, to stop Skull; during this, subtly, Magus tries to assert control of Warlock. Skull uses his teleporting stone to open a portal, and gets knocked into it, losing his stones.

We do an epilogue aboard the Milano, the heroes deciding to form the Infinity Watch, to take the stones to the opposite ends of the Universe.

Mid Credits Scene: Gamora and Peter are in an elevator. “I’m just saying, the last time we gave up an infinity stone, I lost you,” he says. “I don’t think I could survive that again.”

“It took a Thanos to kill me the first time- and he’s gone. And she died because the two of you trusted the Xandarians. I’m not just giving this stone to the most advanced power in the universe, but to its greatest warrior.” The elevator opens. We pan across the majestic Shiar throne room, before settling on Gladiator. Back to credits.

End Credits Scene: “I’ve already given up one infinity stone.” Strange says. We’re in his Sanctum Sanctorum.

“That’s why I trust you.” It’s Warlock, handing him one of the stones. “Because I don’t want you to keep it. If my other self…”

“Your other self?”

“The Magus. He knows what I do. He tried to assert control when we were fighting Red Skull. If he knows where the stone is, he’ll take it, first thing. And the Magus with two stones… he’d be harder to stop than Red Skull. Perhaps unstoppable.”

Strange takes the stone. “Have you thought about stepping down? Giving away both stones?”

“It’s my burden. At least for now. Unless you’re offering to take it on?”

Strange touches his third eye. “I’m not sure I’m the right man for the job. I’ve seen who Stephen Strange becomes with too much power. But I can make some inquiries.”