In Its Final Moments, the DCEU Caught Up to Marvel's Starting Point | by Darren Mooney

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[COLUMN] In Its Final Moments, the DCEU Caught Up to Marvel's Starting Point | by Darren Mooney

James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ends the DC Extended Universe (the DCEU) not with a bang, but with a dated Iron Man reference.

After defeating the villainous Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and reconciling with his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) announces the existence of Atlantis to the world. With representatives from the various underwater kingdoms, Arthur addresses the United Nations in his superhero costume. He gives a stirring speech encapsulating the themes of the movie. He closes with a declaration, “I am Aquaman.” He drops the mic. The movie cuts to credits.

There is a charming mid-credits sequence in which Orm, now living incognito among humanity, decides to garnish a burger with a squished bug that he caught scurrying across the table. He bites into the burger, taking a moment to truly appreciate the flavor. In its own way, this postscript is a fitting closing image for the disjointed and uneven shared universe experiment that was Warner Bros.’ big superhero franchise. However, Arthur’s closing speech speaks to something more interesting about this whole fiasco.

That finale pre-credits scene is very odd, even within the logic of a superhero movie that features a drum-playing octopus that is also a deadly tactical operative and no fewer than three separate jokes about pee ending up in Arthur’s mouth. Within the context of the film, presumably everybody already knows that Arthur is Aquaman. He is a member of the Justice League. He hangs out with other superheroes. Arthur’s introduction in The Lost Kingdom has him fighting pirates on the high seas. It would be weirder for him to say, “I am Arthur Curry.”

Arthur’s mic drop moment at the end of The Lost Kingdom only makes sense as an homage to the similar closing scene of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, in which Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) goes off-script during a press conference and declares, “I am Iron Man.” That line was improvised by Downey on set, but it has become truly iconic. It gets a powerful callback during Tony Stark’s death scene in Avengers: Endgame. “I am inevitable,” Thanos (Josh Brolin) boasts. “And I am Iron Man,” Tony replies.

Arthur’s reference is particularly odd, given that it seems like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) exists within the world of The Lost Kingdom. At one point, Arthur compares his relationship with Orm to that between Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). He could be referencing Norse mythology or even comics. However, given his go-to references tend to be more modern and popular, this would seem to imply that Arthur made the conscious decision to end his big bridge-building speech with an homage to a movie he likes.

Last year marked fifteen years since the release of Iron Man. However, the celebrations were muted. The superhero genre found itself in an existential crisis, with Marvel Studios no longer the cultural juggernaut that it had been. The company’s output that year included a few nods to Iron Man, such as the ending of The Marvels that saw Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) charmingly and self-consciously reproducing Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) post-credits cameo. However, this was the most overt shoutout from Marvel Studios.

To be fair, there were also parallels to Iron Man in the basic premise of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Just as Tony was trapped by a warlord in Afghanistan and forced to build weapons, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) accidentally empowers the dictator Kang (Jonathan Majors) while stranded in the Quantum Realm. In broad terms, Quantumania, Secret Invasion and The Marvels are still informed by the “War on Terror” milieu defined by Iron Man. However, these similarities are abstract.

In contrast, the DC movies of the year seemed uncomfortably preoccupied with references to Iron Man. The closing scene of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the most obvious example, but there was also the entire structure of Ángel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle. Largely inoffensive, and therefore the best received of the DC movies last year, Blue Beetle was a fairly straightforward superhero origin story for Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña).

Of course, Blue Beetle is a pre-existing comic book character. Ironically, he actually predates the comic book version of Iron Man. Blue Beetle was created in 1939, and bounced around publishers like Fox and Holyoke before being folded into the DC universe through the company’s acquisition of Charlton Comics in 1983. Jaime Reyes is a legacy character, a teenager granted superpowers after he bonds with a mystical scarab.

The film leans very heavily into the template established by Iron Man. Just like Tony controls his suit by talking to the onboard computer J.A.R.V.I.S. (Paul Bettany), Jaime converses with the scarab’s consciousness, Khaji-Da (Becky G). Just as Tony’s suit allows him the powers of flight and blasting, Jaime’s scarab encases him inside a suit of armor that can fly and produce energy blasts. Both films climax with the hero fighting a bigger dude in a gnarlier suit of armor designed from their template.

Even the casting of Blue Beetle echoes that of Iron Man. Iron Man brought some prestige to its superhero throwdown by casting ’70s icon Jeff Bridges as Obidiah Stane. Blue Beetle does something similar by hiring Susan Sarandon as the villainous Victoria Cord. In both cases, the villains are sleazy corporate types planning to usurp gigantic corporations from their rightful owners in the hopes of using them to manufacture gigantic suits of armor that they can sell on.

Perhaps reflecting the sense that the curtain was drawing down on this shared universe, DC’s other cinematic offerings were nostalgic in their own way. Shazam! Fury of the Gods imagined an ancient mythology asserting itself upon reality, some lost old universe terraforming Philadelphia. The Flash found Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) travelling back to the start of this franchise experiment, confronting the villainous General Zod (Michael Shannon) in a restaged version of the climax of Man of Steel.

Still, it’s fascinating that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Blue Beetle should both hark back so strongly to Iron Man, a movie made by a rival studio that launched a competing shared universe. It’s particularly odd given that, at the time, Iron Man was outperformed (both in terms of box office and awards prestige) by The Dark Knight, a DC movie. It demonstrates that, even with its dying breath, Warner Bros. was desperately chasing what Marvel Studios had accomplished.

In an ideal world, Warner Bros. would have understood that they operated according to a different business logic than Disney, and that the DC properties were fundamentally different from the Marvel properties. Warners had historically been a creative-led studio, whereas Disney was much more of a corporate machine. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others had built Marvel Comics as a single cohesive universe, whereas DC continuity had always been cobbled together on the fly.

Warners should have realized that these were different engines, and that trying to mimic Disney’s approach would not work for them. Still, it's easy to understand the impulse. The MCU is the most successful franchise in the history of cinema. Warner Bros. were far from the only major studio to trip themselves up in the franchise arms race. It’s very hard and risky to come up with new ideas and strategies when dealing with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, so Hollywood inevitably becomes a game of “follow the leader.”

However, nobody could successfully emulate what Marvel Studios accomplished. Disney themselves learned this the hard way with Star Wars. Arguably, Marvel Studios itself has spent the past few years struggling to reproduce the success that it enjoyed between Iron Man and Endgame. In this context, it is perhaps notable that Hollywood’s second most successful shared universe is actually the Conjuring franchise, overseen by James Wan and owned by Warners Bros., which operates by its own logic.

Fifteen years is a long time in Hollywood. Tastes change. The landscape shifts. This is only natural. There is no shame in acknowledging that the model established by Iron Man has served its purpose and reflects a bygone era. So it’s strange that both Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are so reverent of Iron Man, treating Jon Favreau’s film as either a template or as a grace note in movies ostensibly aimed at audiences too young to remember Iron Man’s theatrical release.

Of course, it’s important for movies and genres to acknowledge their antecedents. It’s possible for media to converse across decades. It’s only natural for filmmakers and storytellers to draw on the media that inspired them as children. It makes sense that, fifteen years after Iron Man arrived in cinemas, the superhero genre should be engaged with its legacy and its history. However, there’s something very staid about how Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom approach Iron Man.

John Ford’s The Searchers, released in 1956, was a defining western. It remains a classic of the genre. It was a touchstone for many filmmakers who would follow. However, by the 1970s, its influence was felt in unconventional ways. It has been cited as a touchstone for the iconic closing scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and as key to the ending of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. However, The Godfather and Taxi Driver are not just emulating The Searchers, they are in conversation with it.

Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom don’t have anything interesting to say about Iron Man. They don’t have any clever twists on the material that they are referencing. Watching both movies, it seems like Warner Bros. are simply copying their competitor’s fifteen-year-old homework. This is depressing in itself, but it suggests something even more unsettling. Has the mainstream superhero genre become so stagnant that Iron Man is still a viable model for these films?

There is something poetic in the fact that the DCEU ends with the studio just blatantly ripping off the film that fired the starting pistol on the MCU. In its final moments, Warner Bros. has caught up to Marvel Studios’ starting line. However, it also reveals something about the “superhero fatigue” that has thrown Hollywood into chaos this year. It’s no wonder that audiences have grown tired of these films, if all they can serve are decade-and-a-half-old leftovers.