DC Comics and the movies, redux.

Variety has another article up tonight on Warner Brothers’ plans to go ahead with a series of movies based on the DC Comics superheroes — or, rather, as one of their bloggers puts it, Warner has “plans to make plans.”

The phenomenal success of The Dark Knight, after a summer that had already seemed to be glutted with comic-book movies from Marvel and others, has apparently convinced the folks at Warner that they really need to do something with the rest of the DC stable, which is owned by Time-Warner.

But, paradoxically, the phenomenal success of The Dark Knight also means that Warner dare not go ahead with that rumoured Justice League movie — which would have included Batman among its many characters — for fear of offending the people who are currently responsible for the Batman franchise and have not yet decided whether to go ahead with a third movie.

So what should Warner do? Start cultivating other superheroes, perhaps, and stop worrying about how to team them up, for now.

To that end, IESB.net reported this week that it had landed a copy of Greg Berlanti’s script for Green Lantern, and their review of it sure seems to indicate that Berlanti “gets” what that series is all about. One slight problem: “in scale it’s big, VERY big, and we are hearing rumors that it may be too big for the director currently attached, Greg Berlanti.” So naturally, the newest rumour is that Warner might hand the film over to George Miller, as a consolation prize for pulling the plug on Justice League.

On a related note, MTV Splash Page has asked a few comic-book writers how the Superman franchise might be rebooted — and some of the things they discuss, regarding the origins of the character and whether it was appropriate to focus on the “weakness” of this “American Christ figure” in Superman Returns (2006), rather than on his ability to fight, are very interesting.

Incidentally, in my previous posts on DC Comics and the movies thereof, I neglected to mention that Nikki Finke claimed back in June that DC Comics itself might be facing some major changes in the near future. I haven’t collected comics in over a decade, so I’m out of the loop on the latest comings and goings, but apparently it’s not only the movie studio that can’t get a handle on these characters, or on what to do with them.