Warner Bros. Discovery is now officially a thing. For those who don’t know, last May, AT&T proposed to merge its media subsidiary WarnerMedia with Discovery, Inc. The transaction, worth $43 billion, was completed on April 8, 2022, and with that, a new company was founded. This transaction was particularly interesting to fans of content created by DC Comics and DC Entertainment, which are also operating under the ownership of Warner Bros.
David Zaslav was named the first president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, and this new company reportedly has huge plans for everything that’s under its umbrella, including DC. According to Variety, Warner Bros. Discovery is aiming to expand DC to Marvel’s level of a shared universe, which is something DC already tried, but owners now want to name one person to pull every string, pretty much like Kevin Feige does for Disney’s MCU.
They’re planning to develop a more ‘closely align’ movies, streaming, and gaming content with a “coherent” creative strategy. In other words, DC might experience a huge overhaul in the future. It’s not known how will that affect upcoming projects and their still-active universes like DCEU and Arrowverse, but reports are saying that owners are interested in creating more movies like Todd Phillips’ Joker, which they called “a shining example of how second-billed characters from the DC library can and should be exploited.”
Warner Bros. Discovery is also aiming to expand the streaming content, like HBOMax’s Peacemaker and the upcoming movie Batgirl. The information we’re getting is pretty vague, but one this is for sure, a new age of DC might be on the horizon.
DC’s latest project The Batman starring Robert Pattinson was released last month and it was a box-office success. The fans are still waiting for the sequel to be greenlit. But, that movie isn’t part of the DCEU. DCEU’s upcoming movies Black Adam, Batgirl, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Flash, and Blue Beetle are what DC will offer us by the end of 2023. After that, who knows what we can expect, not only from DCEU, but from everything that has a DC name on it.
