Admittedly, conundrum might be an odd word to describe this situation but stick with me here. I bring up this situation as we as a society dominated by pop culture enter a time where our favorite comic properties, games, and books are being optioned into big Hollywood blockbusters. And lets be honest, there's only one entity that is managing to pull this off successfully while raking in buckets of cash at the same time; that being Marvel Studios. This Hollywood juggernaut went from being a fledgling studio banking its hopes and dreams on a big screen adaption of Iron Man in 2008 to a studio powerhouse with a multi-threaded universe that has thus far grossed over $7 billion dollars at the box office. And the most impressive feat here is that they've done this all without even owning the movie rights to the most popular characters on their comic book roster as the X-Men rights are tied up with Fox while the rights to Spider-Man belong to Sony.
You're probably wondering where DC stands in all of this. Well, DC has been partnered with Warner Bros for years and we have seen many DC related movies in recent years; from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy to Zack Snyder's Superman reboot, Man of Steel. DC is cranking out movies just as much as Marvel is, but they haven't quite gotten the same kind of buzz. What makes it odd is that it's not for lack of trying and it certainly isn't because of the stable of characters DC has access to. DC being partnered with WB means that the full roster of characters is available to them. What seems to have happened is that the only properties that seem viable to them are Batman and Superman. You might say sure, there was that failed Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds and I would be likely to agree if it weren't for the fact that it was just outright a terrible movie.
And therein lays the difference between the two approaches to this scenario. Marvel from the get go had a singular vision for this on screen universe they wanted to build. Each movie was a bigger gamble than the last. As mentioned above, Marvel's two heavy hitter properties aren't even theirs to use on film. This forced them to create a strategy of elevating what were essentially B-list characters into the spotlight; characters that were known but not exactly popular. Characters that actually have some fairly convoluted origin stories but people bought in wholeheartedly. And to this day it continues to be a gamble because any one movie could derail this whole thing as each film is threaded together. The gamble however is paying dividends so far as Marvel has managed to elevate characters like Ant-Man, The Vision, and the Guardians into the mainstream. It's worked out to the point that Sony's failings with the Spider-Man property led to a partnership with Marvel, landing one of their most profitable and recognizable characters appearing in this year's Captain America: Civil War.
