Another one rides the bus
Another one rides the bus
And another comes on and another comes on
Another one rides the bus
Hey, he’s gonna sit by you, another one rides the bus

The above is the chorus from the “Weird Al” Yankovic song, “Another One Rides The Bus.” The song is a parody of the Queen classic Another One Bites The Dust and tells the story of a bus ride from Hell, where an already crowded bus Weird Al is riding becomes so overcrowded that he can’t ever escape or even breathe.

What does this song have to do with comic book movies? Well, let me tell you.

how about a movie with just Superman in it?

— Bully, Little Stuffed Bull 🐮 (@bully_thelsb) July 12, 2023

Over the last month, casting announcements for Superman: Legacy, the first theatrical release in James Gunn’s Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters, his reboot of Warner Brothers Discovery’s slate of films based on their DC Comics characters, have begun. It started back in June with the announcement that David Corenswet has been cast to play Superman while Rachel Brosnahan has been hired to play Lois Lane. That is to be expected. It is hard to have a Superman movie without a Superman and if you are going to have a love interest, it will be Lois Lane. No surprise characters here.

That was followed a few weeks later by the announcement that Isabela Merced will play Hawkgirl, Edi Gathegi will be Mister Terrific and Nathan Fillion will portray a Green Lantern Guy Gardner. The day after that announcement, it was revealed that Anthony Carrigan has been cast as Metamorpho.

This round of casting has set the comic fandom abuzz. Questions abound: Mister Terrific and Metamorpho were teammates on a team called The Terrifics in the comics. Does this mean that group was making the leap the big screen and if so, who will beplaying other team mebers Phantom Girl and Plastic Man. Mr. Terrific was also on the Justice Society of America with Hawkgirl in the comics. Does this mean that team will be reboot so soon after their appearance in Black Adam? Or does Metamorpho, Hawkgirl and Guy Garner means that we are getting a new version of the Justice League?

I also had a question. Could Gunn be dooming his DCU reboot before it even began by letting it fall into the curse that plagues many a comic book movie–having too many characters.

I have been writing about comics and comic book movies for this site for about 16 years. Over that time, I have developed some rules about comic book films. One of the biggest one I come back to is that the quality of the films declines exponentially the more characters you have in the film. I’m not saying having too many characters kill comic book films all by themselves, but when filmmakers cram comic book characters into their films like riders on Weird Al’s bus, the narrative suffers, great characters from the comics are sold short, and good actors are wasted and the film fails.

To prove my theorem, let me demonstrate it with a look at two of the least well-regarded comic book films in history: Batman & Robin and X-Men: The Last Stand. 

Batman & Robin

The first Batman film series was a perfect example of comic book franchises introducing characters from the comics as a way to up the ante as the franchise wears on. Batman started relatively simple–a hero (Batman), a villain (Joker), a love interest (Vicki Vale) and some supporting characters (Alfred, Harvey Dent, Commissioner Gordon) from the comics. Batman Returns had two villains (Penguin from the comics and Max Shreck created for the film) and Catwoman, who straddled the line between love interest and villain.  Alfred and Gordon returned from the first film. Batman Forever added Robin. But Batman & Robin rose it to another level.

It introduced Batgirl, Bane and Dr. Jason Woodrue. None of them were adapted well, but the latter two were especially horrendous.

Bane was introduced in the comics three years before the film and instantly became a major player. During the “Knightfall” storyline that ran through the Bat-books, Bane defeated Batman, broke his back, and became head of the Gotham City underworld. He was one of the most important additions to Batman’s rogue’s gallery in a long time. Batman & Robin turned him into a mute, musclebound lackey with nary a personality.

Jason Woodrue is a character that dated back to 1962. Originally a human Atom villain called Plant Master, he eventually turned himself into the Floronic Man, more plant than animal.  He was written into stories by two of the most important writers in comic book history–Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. If that wasn’t enough, he was played by John Glover, one of the best character actors in Hollywood (If you haven’t seen Gremlins 2: The New Batch, it’s worth a look just for Glover’s performance of the Ted Turner/Donald Trump hybrid, Daniel Clamp). All of this meant nothing. The character only received around five minutes of screen time before getting killed off.

No effort was spent on developing either character. If you were a fan of their comic book versions, you would be upset. But the producers probably thought they were doing the fans a favor by just including the characters in the film.

That brings us to X-Men: The Last Stand.

X-Men: The Last Stand

You get the feeling that the producers took the title “The Last Stand” literally, because they crammed so many X-Men characters into the film that it was almost bursting at the seams. Here is a list of new characters as per IMDB (barring any errors by me): Beast, Juggernaut, Callisto, Angel, Multiple Man, Leech, Artie, Anole, Phat, Psylocke, Arclight, Quill, Glob Herman and Spike. This is in addition to the numerous characters from the previous films that were brought back and/or given expanded roles.

If you didn’t know half these characters were in the film, you’re not alone. I didn’t either. Most were just background window dressing/combat fodder. Pity any comic fan whose favorite characters were on this list. This might be the only time you’d see them on the big screen and all they do is stand in the background or get punched by a hero.

And you didn’t always get the version of the character you loved from the comics. Juggernaut is one of the most important X-Men villains. He is Professor Xavier’s stepbrother and is popular enough to star in three different miniseries. You wouldn’t know this from the film, where Juggernaut is merely a thug. They spent no time establishing the comic book connection between the character and Xavier, instead focusing on shoehorning the “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch” Internet meme into the script.

Once again, talented actors like Vinnie Jones and Ben Foster were wasted. And if you think the actors aren’t upset by it, look at these quotes from a 2020 interview with Jones:

“I loved the role, but hopefully you can put it fucking right here, mate. I basically got mugged off. Matthew Vaughn signed me up, and it was a great role and a great script, and Juggernaut was a great character. I signed up for three of them, and that will show you how serious I was about it. Brett Ratner basically dissolved the character. I was in my fucking trailer half the time. It’s one of the most disappointing jobs I’ve been on as far as, you  know, ‘What am I doing here?'”

“It wasn’t the same Juggernaut as I signed on for. They took his storyline away, they’d taken his character away, his dialogue. I had two big meetings with Brett about it, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s coming. They’re writing stuff for you as we speak’ and it never fucking happened,” Jones continued. “Disappointment wise, that was probably one of the biggest. What’s upsetting is some of the fans blame me! It was fucking nothing to do with me! That role, I didn’t sign up for. The Juggernaut you saw was not the Juggernaut I signed on for with Matthew Vaughn, I’ll tell you that now. It upset me.”

“It was a different script, and then Brett, for some reason, brought all these other characters on board that had one line each in the fucking movie and it was a joke, really. It was so disappointing, you know?”

To clarify, Matthew Vaughn was hired on to direct X-Men: The Last Stand and had begun the casting process. Vinnie Jones was one of the actors he brought on. However, personal issues caused Vaughn to drop out. Fox hired Brett Ratner and as seen above he took the film in a different direction than what Vaughn had intended.

I just can’t see the logic behind loading up films with tons of characters and thinking you are doing fans a service. X-Men: The Last Stand was only 1 hour and 45 minutes long. There is no way to give all these characters the proper introduction, yet whatever time you dedicate to them takes away time that could be devoted to the rest of film. And since The Last Stand had two separate plotlines adapted from the comics books in it, it needed all the help it could get.

Some of you might be thinking, “what about Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame? Those films featured everybody who had ever appeared in a Marvel film and both films rocked!” I could use a cop-out and say that those films are the exceptions that prove the rule. I’m not going to. Because there are other reasons why they work–namely time.

Both films are over two hours long (Endgame is over three!). That bladder-bursting run time gives a lot of room to fit in moments for all the characters. Not that it really needed all that time. Most of the heavy lifting of characterization was done in the ten years of films beforehand. If you were like me, you saw all the MCU movies going into these two films, and you know who the characters were.

The Eternals

Which isn’t to say that Marvel is infallible when it comes to the “too-many-characters” problem. I present you with The Eternals. As I mentioned in my review, the film spent way too much time telling us who the characters were as a group instead of letting us know who they were as individuals. The result is vague characterization that got weaker as you moved down the call sheet, and the movie suffered for it. You might say that with ten main characters, there wasn’t enough time to give each one their due. But the film was over 2 and a half hours long. There should have been enough time.

Of course, there are films that feature rather large casts that do an okay job of representing them on screen. There’s Batman Begins, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 1-3, and The Suicide Squad. Those last two examples, of course, were directed by James Gunn, which gives us some hope that Superman: Legacy will be good no matter how many characters there are.

Will SUPERMAN:LEGACY Be Any Different?

However, as Bully tweeted above, you don’t really need to have the entire DC Universe in a Superman film. Superman is good enough that he doesn’t need to share. The fact that there are so many other characters, many that have not been seen in films before, that it makes me think they are jump starting the new DC Extended Universe all at once.

Which is fine, but how are they going to do it? Are these characters (and any more added on) just be making a cameo, to be further fleshed out later? So, far, the only one of the above characters that has something in the pipeline is Guy Gardner, assuming he would be part of the Lanterns TV series. Gunn said that all of Chapter 1’s entries have not been announced, so we might have a hint at some of the additions in these castings.

Or all these characters going to be part of the film’s narrative? That means they will have to be properly introduced. Yes, Gunn didn’t really give a lot of backstory to all of the characters in The Suicide Squad, but there is a difference in quality between Arm Fall Off Boy and Mister Terrific. The latter has an interesting, if tragic, backstory and origin that kind of needs to be told. Same with Metamorpho. Same with Guy Gardner. And Hawkgirl has an origin so convoluted that they’d need a film all by itself to tell it. Lord knows that Superman’s origin doesn’t need to be retold. There are yetis in the Himalayas that can quote it from memory. But trying to fit four–or more–origins in to one three-hour movie might mean you lose something.

Again, this is all speculation at this point. But it is something to think about. Gunn might add another hero on, and another hero on and another hero on. If then, as history shows, the new DCEU might be in trouble before it even begins.