News Reporter: Act Four: DC's biggest problem: It's making movies, while Marvel is making large-scale TV

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Margot Robbie in a scene from “Suicide Squad.” (Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

On Tuesday night, my friend, the critic Peter Suderman, and I sat in a bar trying to deconstruct the many things that had gone wrong with “Suicide Squad,” the disastrous movie that was supposed to have saved DC’s cinematic universe after the highly disappointing “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” As those of you who have read my review of the movie know, I was revolted by a streak of weightless nastiness in the movie that has nothing to do with actual transgression. But “Suicide Squad” is also just a wreck of a film in its failure to tell us a story that makes sense, present a visual spectacle or, most of all, introduce us to its characters in a meaningful way.

A couple of times during our conversation, I told Peter that it simply felt like DC had rushed the fence. Rather than building up to a team-up movie with films that introduced characters like murderous shrink Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) or family-minded assassin Deadshot (Will Smith) before seeing them captured and brought together in an unlikely team-up, “Suicide Squad” dives right in, without sufficient emotional investment or character development for the movie to carry any particular weight. And the more I thought about it, the same is true of “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” which effectively killed off its Superman (Henry Cavill) in the first act of what is still supposed to be a multi-movie series.

I understand why DC might want to generate big emotional moments in an effort to catch up to Marvel, which is far deeper into the development of its cinematic universe. But in moving so fast, and squandering so many big moments, DC seems to be scuttling its ability to catch up.

The reason Marvel’s cinematic universe works so well is that it functions more like television than movies. The structure of each installment is fundamentally similar — it’s essentially a superhero procedural — but the character development is serial from movie to movie, so that we understand why Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) would sacrifice everything for Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), or why Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) feels drawn to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) but respects his need to regain his self-control.

DC, by contrast, isn’t demonstrating the patience to build its world or its characters in the same way. You can destroy only so many cities and have us still care if we don’t know the people on the ground.