Menu

DC Becomes DC Entertainment… So What?


dc-logo.jpg

?Well, let me tell you so what. You can read the official announcement here, but here’s the important bits:
? DC Comic is being renamed DC Entertainment, and will as such focus on all media, not just comics. Given that Marvel has been Marvel Entertainment forever, and been able to focus itself on those same media, this is a good idea and long overdue.
? President/publisher Paul Levitz is stepping down to be some kind of editor and consultant supreme or something.
? The new president of DC Entertainment will be Diane Nelson, who used to be president of Warner Premiere, which made the generally excellent DC animated movie (and god knows what else, if anything). But she also handles Harry Potter for Warner, so… wow.
? Nelson will report directly to Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group. This sounds like an improvement until you realize that Levitz had
reported to Alan Horn, president and COO of Warner Bros.
Entertainment. However, one assumes that Robinov will listen closely to the lady in charge of Harry Potter.
? This has absolutely nothing to do with Disney’s buyout of Marvel last week. With a corporation as big as Time-Warner, you can’t do anything like this that quick; it’s probably been in the works for months.

So what does this all mean? Well, nothing concrete at the moment, but it does mean Warner Bros. and DC realize they are way behind in the superhero entertainment race (and I’m not talking about piddly little comic books here) and are trying to get their shit together. The name change is hopefully indicative of actual policy change (besides new prez Nelson) that will either give DC more power over its multimedia potential or at least a better position when talking to the Warner execs who can. While this company transformation guarantees nothing, I’d say it’s a huge step in the right direction. Getting some Warner movie execs in charge of DC is probably the best way to get DC movies made, and since they’re DC people now, hopefully they’ll be inclined (if only by virtue of their fellow comics employees) to be reasonably true to the characters and properties.

But I have one worry — and that’s that DC Comics is seemingly going bye-bye here. Now, Marvel Entertainment has been around for a while, but Marvel Comics has always been a part of that. They’ve got one team working on the comics, and the higher-level team working on the movies and cartoons and games and so forth. If DC Comics is now DC Entertainment, then the whole company is working on everything, and it seems to me like the comics could get short-shrift. Obviously, that’s seemingly unlikely, and its not like DC is going to pull its editors off the comics to work on movie scripts; it’s also likely that DC Entertainment is already properly subdivided in sections much like Marvel has. But there’s a world of difference between working in a company whose bottom-line is multimedia entertainment, and a smaller subdivision of a company whose bottom-line is making good comics.

On the other hand, DC Comics is now Detective Comics Entertainment and not Detective Comics Comics. That’s definitely a move for the best.