DC Executive Producer Charles Rowen on Shared Universe
So, what kind of operation is DC and Warner Brothers running over there? We’ve seen stills, clips, trailers, and interviews, but are they unified? Is there a cohesive vision there like Marvel, with a clear and present plan to march towards the future? Charles Rowen, one of the executive producers of many of the DC movies, shared his thoughts and what we can expect from them. Apparently, Charles Rowen is part of a ‘Brain-Trust’!
“I think also very much involved in that brain trust is John Berg, who is the executive vice president at Warner Bros. I would say the Snyders, myself, John Berg, and Geoff Johns would be sort of that Brain Trust… I’m working with great people. They’re all really great people. And not that we don’t—there are many times we agree, and there’s many times we don’t agree [and] we work it out.”
So, with an overall council on direction, what kind of interaction do they have with the individual directors? Are they micro managers? Again, Charles Rowen broke it down for us.
“The other thing that I really love about what we’re doing is we’re also bringing in really talented other filmmakers and having them come in and create—I call it the sandbox. We’ve got this sandbox of the Justice League DC characters, and we are hoping to create—this series of movies that we’ve announced are somewhat interlinked. The characters move at a throughline that hopefully will take us all the way to Justice League 2, but they also can interact in the other films as well in some way… So if, for example, The Flash movie or the Aquaman film is gonna come out after Justice League 1, it’s not gonna be a completely different character; that character will have evolved from Justice League 1. Wonder Woman, when we see her in Justice League 1, will have evolved from Batman v Superman. Unless we decide that in one of these stories we’re gonna do something that happened in the past and have it be more of an origination story, in which case you’ll realize how that character became what they were in the movie that they were first introduced.”