Building a DC Universe: Continuity, Reinvention and Earning the Audience's Investment
Imagine Kevin Feige overseeing a DC reboot. Would he approach the challenge differently? Not necessarily by making better films, but by handling the audience’s existing emotional investment differently. Audiences don’t arrive with empty memories. The challenge is deciding how to acknowledge those memories while giving them something new worth caring about. What interests me isn’t whether DC should copy Marvel’s formula. It’s whether DC could learn from the way Marvel has sometimes used an audience’s attachment to the past as a bridge to the future. Steve Rogers passing the shield to Sam Wilson illustrates what I mean. It wasn’t simply a replacement. Steve’s history, his relationship with Sam and the significance of that shield became part of the transition. The audience was invited to continue the journey, not asked to treat its previous investment as irrelevant. That doesn’t mean every viewer embraced Sam, or that every subsequent story succeeded. It means the transition gav...