We might not have to wait too long for a Justice League movie, and that’s according to Warner Bros. president of domestic distribution, Dan Fellman. The other day we ran a story about Warner Bros. releasing 9 DC movies in four years, and by all accounts what these movies are, will be announced toward the end of this month. Fellman says that the first Justice League movie is alot closer than we think and went on to tell EW that “While it hasn’t been officially announced, I think it’s a pretty good bet”
Alot closer than we think? Hazarding a guess I’d say Justice League will arrive either June 23 2017 or November 17, 2017. Anything earlier is very unlikely. Warner start the DC marathon on August 5th 2016 and unless Synder is shooting some bits for Justice League, there isn’t much of a chance that a decent JL movie would be ready by then. It’s an interesting strategy from Warner and DC though and quite the opposite from Marvel. Marvel Studios spent a good few years introducing their characters to audiences, like Iron-Man, Thor and so on. While we all know Batman and Superman, Warner and DC will thrust audiences into an unknown movie landscape with the full plethora of the Justice League. Besides Bats and Supes audiences will not be too familiar with the rest of the crew, and depending on what Synder can squeeze into Batman v Superman, (Wonder Woman is definitely in there) it’s a big gamble. What if a Justice League movie bombs? Or certain characters test poorly with audiences? That could push the entire slate back onto the drawing board. The obvious strategy is release the Justice League movie and the characters get spin offs. Whether or not certain characters are strong enough to hold their own movie together, remains to be seen. But lets see what happens.
Fellman also spoke about the change of release date for Batman v Superman stating “The reality now is there really isn’t a bad week to open a movie, If you look at the summer box office this year, you can see that there were so many movies, one after the other. You can start with Spider-Man, two weeks later Godzilla, and then Maleficent, and then Edge of Tomorrow, and then Jump Street and Transformers. And the one thing they all had in common, not one of them did over $250 million. We’ll be the first one up [in 2016], which is very important, and we’ll have six weeks before Captain America comes in.”
