For years fans of both Marvel and DC have been saying that DC movies were bad. Man of Steel was bad. Batman vs Superman was terrible. Justice League should have never been made. Fans talk about how bad the DCU is for a number of reasons but one of the main reasons is the order of which the films are released.

Marvel starts out original stories and creates these beautiful worlds and stories that are self contained within their own character, setting, or event. Then they interlock all of these stories and they keep building off of each other.

Before the Avengers movie was released, we had 2 Iron Man movies, as well as the intro movies for Hulk, Thor, and Captain America. Then they're all linked together. Fans were like oh wow this is a big event, all my favorite superheros in one place.

That's not what DC did at all. Yeah DC tried a similar approach to what Marvel did with Iron Man by giving Superman two movies but they went the complete opposite way. What they did was they basically started with the big crossover(s) and then went into the backstory and origins.

First they had Man of Steel. Yay a Superman movie. Then they had Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. It's still technically a Superman movie but they decided to throw Batman in. But wait there's more. They decided to throw in Wonder Woman too, literally out of nowhere. They couldn't have introduced her in the Wonder Woman movie or in Justice League like how they did The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg, but they threw her in for a few minutes for no real reason.

Then comes Justice League with a whole lot of new inductees and DC hoped that the success of the big 3 was enough to sustain the other characters random appearances.

This easily one of the biggest reasons why DC isn't what it could have been. Wonder Woman and Aquaman were great but the order of the films is really as confusing and unnecessary as the X-Men timeline.

The number reason DCU sucks: Zack Snyder. 

Thankfully, they have finally learned to keep him in production and get actually good directors to work on their movies going forward. Or at least it looks like it. 

But it's too late now, people equate DCU with bad directing. The studios must have had some pretty tight investments in him, because he got mediocre reviews on all his movies from Watchmen in 2009 onward. 

While I agree the DCU should have taken their time more you would have had people complaining that it took 10 years to FINALLY get the Justice League together.

There is NO winning with movies right now. Unless you put out an absolute masterpiece of a movie it gets brutalized by some group.

The DCU movies have all made money as far as I know. Not at the Marvel level but enough to make it worth making more. And I've enjoyed every single DC movie I've seen to date. Sure I have issues with some aspects of them but not to the degree where I would use the terms terrible or awful. DC has been stuck trying to "catch up" with Marvel and I think that is their big mistake.... which you mostly covered.

I still think that there are too many fan critics out there or people who enjoyed a movie, then watched or read a review online and jumped the bandwagon to say the movie wasn't that good anymore.

So, I had a big thing prepared about how I'd rewrite the series, but I have some buttons on the side of my mouse that forward and back pages, so when I got up, then sat back down to my desk and grabbed my mouse it went back to the thread and deleted four paragraphs of love.
I'm used to it at this point.

Here's my issue with the build up from Man of Steel to Batman v Superman, the guys in charge of these movies don't know what story they're trying to tell across multiple films. I say this based on what was established in Man of Steel, an origin story for Superman, or Kal-El, Clark, Jesus, whoever. As excessive and overblown the sequence of events in that movie was, they still did well in painting Clark as a boy who grew up with powers out of his own control, not knowing who he was, then understanding that he was unique and had capabilities beyond any normal human. Despite this, he still only wanted a normal life, and despite the constant calls to action, like God really is trying to shove Clark into that suit, he keeps running away from his destiny. By the time he's Superman, the whole superhero business is new to him, he doesn't know how to handle the role properly. We have something to relate to with this version of Superman, and here's where Batman v Superman becomes lopsided. We don't have the backstory for this Batman, we don't have anyone relatable whose actions have roots we can trace back, so what the movie has to rely on is the credential of the fans knowing the basic outline of Batman.

Granted, there is a way that introducing new characters like Batman and Wonderwoman so suddenly can work out, it's been done plenty of times before, and I think for a prime example we should look at Enter the Spiderverse. This movie is all about the fan service, different interpretations of Spiderman across different retellings of the basic formula. That's a lot of Spidermen with different backstories and motives, but these cameo characters remain just that, cameos. That's because, in a similar fashion to the Green Lantern Corps or like, Doctor Strange or something, they're all united in a similar cause. This type of induction story has been used for film series like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: A New Hope, and The Matrix, a main character is given a destiny and introduced to a group of adventurers in a quest, a group of people with similar abilities, often working toward a common goal, and the character must adjust to the change. This kind of plot element is useful for establishing convention and world building, and as the story continues various elements can be further explored and side characters can be fleshed out.

Why would this work so well with the DCU? Well if DC isn't going the way of Marvel and creating multiple stories to converge with each other, jumping straight into the Justice League may be a viable option. Like I mentioned, in Man of Steel we were given the long tale of Clark Kent's first attempt at being a superhero, a rather messy attempt at that [Aliens in bootleg Manhattan start a saiyan battle, millions dead]. Here's where Batman could step into the story. Like I mentioned, we don't know much about this version of Batman, but we do know a lot about the name. Instead of Aflacman learning about Superman's incident with Zod and being like, "well butter my hams, there's a nuclear alien causing a ruckus, I better pop a keg into that there rascal", he could propose to support Superman and help him become a better hero. Typical traits of Batman line up with this, a man who cares about justice, the kind of hero who wants to incapacitate criminals through non-violent means, several Batmen have even expressed interest in giving some villains the chance to reform. A cookiecutter Batman may be just what we need to open up the Justice League to Superman, who then meets up with other unique heroes, Wonderwoman, Aquaman, the Flash, all from different backgrounds, but all expressing a similar interest, working for the greater good of all citizens. The Justice League movie would develop their cooperation with one another while Superman gets a grip on acting more like the household icon we know Superman as. Then, as the first Justice League movie comes to a close and more movies are announced, we can have more superhero specific movies, adventures related more specifically to Batman or the Flash or a new hero like the Green Arrow (wait, they already made that a series...), working with the premise that was established to expand the universe.

Of course none of this matters because Batman v Superman was already made and we're already up to Aquaman. Hey, they're doing better though.

Mecha Leo : Yeah, they definitely are doing better. I loved Wonder Woman and Aquaman. In fact, I'd probably say that Wonder Woman is one of my most favorite superhero movies of all time, better than a good chunk of MCU movies even.