The DCEU has finally completed its "Death and Return of Superman" arc with Justice League - and now the dirt has settled, it might just have been the shared universe's biggest mistake.The DC Extended Universe is five movies deep, and only one of those - Wonder Woman - can be called an unprecedented success. The rest have admittedly made money (bar Justice League, which is currently looking to lose Warner Bros. up to $100M) yet stand out as critical failures, earning mostly negative reviews across the board. The reasons for this are plentiful and heavily discussed, but ultimately come down to the bold-albeit-challengingly-flawed artistic vision and reactionary studio meddling (the three worst-received movies - Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad and Justice League - were all tampered with in post-production to varying degrees).

Read More: Justice League Reshoots: Every Change Whedon Made To Snyder's Film

However, there is a third factor, one more ingrained in the actual text that nevertheless looms large over the franchise and not only represents the core issues but actively developed them. It really cannot be overstated how much the DCEU's fate hinged on The Death of Superman. And what a folly it was.

Warner Bros. Obsession With Killing Superman (This Page)

Warner Bros. Has Been Obsessed With Killing Superman For Decades

Death of Superman

The notion of killing Superman isn't some abstract idea, but a focused one powered almost exclusively by 1992's The Death of Superman. The mega-event-to-end-all-mega-events, Dan Jurgens' storyline did what it said on the tin; the Man of Steel was killed in a brutal brawl with the freshly-introduced Kryptonian monster Doomsday, an epic turn in the then-54-year-old character's history. What followed was an arc originally called Reign of the Supermen but is now commonly known by the more accurate The Return of Superman; four potential replacements to the mantle appeared in the months after Kal-El's death vying to be crowned the "true" Superman, until the real Supes returned care of the Fortress of Solitude (now with infamous black suit and mullet).

While it's famous and remains a popular trade paperback (there are few more definitive Superman stories), the tale has some major problems. Predominantly, it was mainly a marketing ploy. Comics were right in the middle of what was known as the "speculator bubble" in the early-1990s, where adult collectors drove sales up and led to a rise in special editions and a desire for potentially valuable issues. The death of the superhero was deemed by DC as the biggest they could cultivate, hence its mega-mega event status. Indeed, as a story, it's not up to much: Superman is punched to death then brought back after a period of treading water in the most obvious fashion.

But that didn't matter to Warner Bros. They saw the sales success of the comic run and understood the cultural cache of killing off one of modern culture's defining icons (as well as the subsequent excitement of a return), so became obsessed with turning it into a film. They came very close in the late-1990s with Superman Lives, a Tim Burton project starring Nicolas Cage as Supes, but that fell through after the company suffered a string of financial failures (including Batman & Robin). However, the idea remained and resurfaced in several of the proposed Superman scripts over the next decade; elements even featured heavily in Superman Returns. It was an obsession that transcends executive rule, and in 2016 they finally got their wish - and with it discovered why it was such a bad idea.

Superman and Doomsday lay death in Batman V Superman

The Death of Superman Didn't Work in Batman v Superman

The Death of Superman was finally achieved in live-action with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Henry Cavill's second go around as the character. And already we have the problem of textual weight. In print, The Death of Superman can be argued to have succeeded based on the Kryptonian's storied history in the preceding five decades of comics. In Batman v Superman, it's played as a step in his realization as a hero, before we ever really know who he truly is. This changes the meaning in a seismic way. The death isn't the stamp on a lifetime of duty but sacrifice in the face of adversity to prove heroism, and with that we step from the original destruction of the modern myth (ironic given what Zack Snyder was going for) to basic Christ allegory: the Jesus parallels in Superman has been on the rise for a long time and already prevalent in Man of Steel, but it was turned up to eleven here in both concept and Snyder's artistically-influenced imagery. And yet there was no seeming depth to that change; what purpose is there beyond stating Supes is an ideal?

Related: Batman V Superman Ending Explained

The root of that gulf is that Death was adapted alongside another long-gestating comic arc, The Dark Knight Returns. Here we go from confused vision to clash: Returns and Death are fundamentally different stories about different versions of both the wider DC universe and the character specifically. Their versions of Superman don't gel, and an attempt to marry them is going to weaken one or the other. Indeed, when you pair the focus on Batman in the first half of the film and the fact we've only spent minimal time establishing the God about to be killed, the story structure creaks and we don't get the required weight.

Wonder Woman with Lois as they are next to Superman's dead body in Batman V Superman

In the finished film, the Death story (not just the act itself but its establishment) feels like an afterthought, placed awkwardly in the narrative and its setup throughout treated as a crutch. Doomsday, in particular, is forced in at the last minute and not a moment of consideration is made towards justifying his presence beyond "it's what happened in the comics"; there's an interesting potential meta-narrative to Lex Luthor engineering a creature to kill Superman in-universe just as Jurgens did for his story that isn't even glanced at. It also didn't help that Superman is been incapacitated less than twenty minutes before by an atomic bomb (a belated Dark Knight Returns reference), meaning invested audiences have already been through the emotions of a dead hero.

If you try and view Batman v Superman through any conventional measure, its main plot comes to a close with the rescuing of Martha: the Doomsday fight is an extended coda that begs importance but never hits. And that's before we get to how the overt sacrifice (as opposed to simply dying doing his duty in print) is contrived in setup and full of logic holes. It, frankly, feels like a World's Finest movie was highjacked by the studio's long-standing desire to realize the arc no matter the suitability or cost.

Related: Previous Times Superman Came Back From The Dead

Whatever the case, it was a failure, and the cultural shrug after release, with none of the tears or shock Warner Bros. likely imagined, really only highlights that. That the event, regardless of execution, should be shocking yet wasn't is stunning, and the core reason may be down to the mediums and how they handle death: in comics, there's an accepted suspension of disbelief when a character dies, with the ongoing story playing as if it could be permanent even though any savvy reader knows it won't stick; in film, tropes can be more glaring and enjoyment from the complete journey. After all, it's not enough to make something disappear - you have to bring it back. And that's where things get worse.

How The Return of Superman Broke Justice League

Whatever happened in Dawn of Justice and whatever your feelings towards it, Justice League offered hope - in many franchise ways but particularly in regards to Superman's death. What Snyder delivered in Batman v Superman was only half the story, and the DCEU's team-up would complete it. If done well, it may even justify prior creative decisions. Spoiler: it didn't. Instead, we get a perfect example of why rigid cross-movie storytelling can be such a risk.

In theory, Superman's resurrection provides some tension to Justice League's narrative. His status takes it from being just a gang of heroes coming together to fight some insurmountable threat they couldn't handle alone (a la The Avengers) to a story of humanity's literal redemption and the completion of our character's origin arc. However, the integration is totally flawed. As it stands, the Superman resurrection feels about as random in Justice League as his death did in Batman v Superman; cut it out and you still have a serviceable escalation of threat and conflict. This isn't helped by the jarring establishment (Bruce brings it up randomly mid-conversation), negligible impact on the heroes (all he really does is help Cyborg in a task he was already doing) and, yes, the terrible CGI-erased mustache that the reshoots added.

Read More: Is Justice League Worse Than Batman v Superman?

However, to blame the pickups for the mishandling of Superman's return is getting it the wrong way round: the reshoots are made worse by having to contend with Supes. Joss Whedon's additions are accepted to have been done to drastically change Snyder's original vision to be something more marketable, primarily by inserting some Marvel-esque humor. However, another important part of it was to downplay the connection to the highly divisive Batman v Superman (and in place building in more links to the beloved Wonder Woman). This was quite easy to do for the most part seeing as the primary plot dealt with an alien threat only teased lightly in Dawn of Justice; the mythology was played down and all the characters essentially begin as blank slates.

This is technically true of Superman too, who is instantly more "a beacon of hope" than ever presented before. However, that had to be done alongside his resurrection, a situation that due to its narrative prominence needed to be carried over almost perfectly from BvS and dealt with in a similar manner at a similar point in the plot as always planned. When everything WB wanted changing was corrected, this one element had to remain in some pure form (although, it must be pointed out the film does ignore the dirt rising from the coffin). That's why it jars in the flow so much - the sequence may be full of Whedon-isms, but conceptually was the only thing that couldn't be truncated, which just stands out more. Now, it would be an exaggeration to say being beholden to Superman's return is singularly what hurt Justice League, but based on that uncanny-valley upper lip we know it was at their core of the reshoots and thus had a major impact.

This may also explain one of the major pitfalls in Warner Bros' handling of the return: the marketing. When Justice League entered production, Henry Cavill was second on the cast list and featured at the center of the first released image. However, by the time the main marketing blitz began, any mention of Superman's presence was gone and the cast suddenly daren't even reaffirm his involvement. It was almost like "Where's Luke?" from Star Wars: The Force Awakens in terms of the obvious nature, yet it was never pitched into real hype; everyone knew he's come back in the third act (again, the distinction between comics and movies), so the real mystery wasn't there. For a cultural event twenty years in the making, WB sure messed it up. And it may be because they frankly couldn't show him. Once it was decided everything was to be reshot, there was no footage to even tease it (indeed, the two scene pertaining to Superman - Clark in the cornfield and Alfred hoping it wasn't too late - aren't even in the film) and so they had to hide him.

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Batman v Superman messed up the Death of Superman, but his subsequent return actively hampered Justice League. It's a story of rampant artistic freedom and hubristic forward planning collapsing under studio trepidation, although considering how the entire arc was so embedded at Warner Bros. despite coming from already greedy origins, perhaps it was always doomed to fail.

Next: Justice League Reveals Why Lois is œThe Key

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