This is the reason JL sucked:
Because the people making the movies (Snyder/executives) are just making god damn stupid movies. Their successes come when they hand the project over to really talented people and let them make magic. Suicide Squad tanked because the executive input was fucking ridiculous and they new the final product sucked so badly that they handed it to a trailer-studio to recut because they were literally desperate to find something that would seem hip to fans.
The thing Marvel is doing well is they are creating movies with characters that are basically how every comic book fan pictured them. DC is going the opposite route: they're taking big chances. It pays off when they give the projects to Christopher Nolan and Patty Jenkins, but tanks when they give the project to a fucking idiot like Zack Snyder. Captain America: Civil War was literally what every fanboy imagined when they pictured those characters. For comparison, Zack Snyder was giving interviews about how, in his movies, Bruce Wayne would get raped in prison.
Marvel puts out movies that connects with people's internal images of the characters. DC hands the reigns over to a fucking idiot and lets him drive their entire universe in directions that the audience doesn't want, then the executives jump on board with their wildly stupid, misfiring ideas to right a badly listing ship, only have the entire thing go down. In flames, which is fucking impressive for a boat.
Making good, successful movies is hard. Making good, successful movies that launch extended universes is almost impossible. The only successful examples of it is Marvel, Lego and John Wick... and I'm not even sure that was John Wick's intent: they probably just set out to make a damn good movie and popped out something that mesmerized people with the unseen corners of John Wick's world. Sony's Spider-Man, the Terminator Franchise, the Dark Universe franchise all fucking tanked because they laid the foundation for an extended universe in a half-assed, stupid way and then inserted those cinematic appetizers into movies that, by themselves, were stupid and half-assed! And DC most definitely falls into this category, except they look more ridiculous than most because they have significantly more advantages than any other studio out there and are FAILING IN THE DUMBEST POSSIBLE WAYS EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's like if they took the weights off of Seabiscuit, put him at the starting line to demolish significantly handicapped competition and then starting hitting him in the legs with sledge hammers just before the race began.
(Transformers is doing the extended universe thing, too, with 14 movies in production and are literally only held afloat by the Chinese box office because they're starting to fail just as hard as everyone else.)
