Right now, the multiverse is very much an “It-Girl” in media. It allows series that are interconnected or have multiple canons to have those various parts interact despite inconsistencies between them. Adil El Arbi, co-director of the upcoming Batgirl movie, just talked about the weird one that exists within the DC Comics movies.
Batgirl will star Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon, going up against Brendan Fraser’s Firefly, with mentoring from the old timeline Batman himself, Michael Keaton.
Currently, within the DCEU, there is a timeline with Zack Snyder’s incarnation of Batman, Superman, etc., which then diverges with the combating worlds of Joss Whedon’s and Snyder’s versions of Justice League. Both The Batman and Joker exist in Elseworld-type canons that aren’t part of the Justice League universe. Titans and Doom Patrol are their own world, and whatever happens with Ezra Miller’s The Flash, it will be introducing a Supergirl we haven’t seen before. Oh, that reminds me, we also have the Arrowverse world and the new DC world established by Superman & Lois.
A whole lot of DC content.
El Arbi just worked on two episodes of Marvel’s Ms. Marvel, so he is very aquatinted with the chaotic delights of a multiverse. While talking to The Direct, he spoke about the fact that Michael Keaton’s Batman will be involved in Batgirl, as well as J.K. Simmons returning as Commissioner Jim Gordon from Snyder’s world.
“Well you know, we’d sort of give the same answer, because we would also ask, ‘Oh, you have J.K. Simmons from the Snyderverse and we got Michael Keaton from the Burton-verse. What’s the situation there?’ And they would say, ‘Don’t worry about it. We got a plan,’” says El Arbi.
What exactly is that plan? They do not know. “They never really explained that aspect to us,” El Arbi confessed, “but I guess you’re gonna have to see the other movies to understand what happens, why the reason is that we ended up in sort of a spaghetti of Multiverses in that aspect. It’s gonna be a delicious spaghetti, I’m sure of that.”
Well, that bodes for confusion.
Ultimately, as I said in discussing Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder, I want comic book movies to focus on telling good internal narratives and having arcs for their leading characters. Multiverses are cool and everything, but so is having a strong self-contained narrative.
(via AV Club, featured image: HBO Max)
