DC Studios Reveals The Creative Team Behind The Brave And The Bold

Yesterday, the creative team behind the upcoming DCU Batman movie was officially revealed. Andy Muschietti (The Flash) and Christina Hodson (Birds of Prey) will be directing and writing the movie respectively. This has led to some consternation among people on the internet concerned that this team could lead to a bad product, considering the two had previously teamed up for The Flash. As to be expected, the majority of the blame is being directed toward Hodson while Muschietti is being largely ignored for his role in all this.

Part of the issue with this is the phrasing. When you say that Hodson had previously written Birds of Prey, The Flash, and the never-released Batgirl movie, it’s easy to say she’s going to be the problem. The issue with this is, we have to take these films within the wider context of what was going on with DC Studios at the time. Birds of Prey is really good and is definitely a top five DC movie of the post-Man of Steel era. It came out a month before the pandemic-related shutdowns, was marketed poorly, was coming off a string of not great films from DC at the time, and was in direct competition with Sonic The Hedgehog. The box office returns for the film were not great, but the final result is still fantastic.

We also can’t take what was said about Batgirl at face value, because it was all done during regime change where the incoming ownership was culling expensive streaming properties and either moving them for a more profitable theatrical release or just never release it in favor of a tax write-off for the value of the budget. The only people we’ve heard say the movie was so bad that it would harm the DC brand also thought that The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, and Black Adam were good and worth releasing in theaters. It’s probably safe to say that their judgment may not be the best.

Which brings us to the only objectively bad DC movie that we can say with certainty is bad in her filmography, The Flash. We don’t know how much of that movie actually was her doing because it was in development for about a decade with several writers and directors attached. The end result that Muschietti and Hodson ended up holding the bag on was a colossal mess of studio interference. Considering what we’ve seen her do on franchises when left to her own devices (Bumblebee and Birds of Prey), I wouldn’t hold The Flash against her specifically.

That said, Muschietti is more the wild card because he has a serviceable original horror movie (Mama), both parts of It, and The Flash under his belt. Of these films, he has one that I can look at definitively and say is good. If anything has the potential to be a negative mark on The Brave and the Bold, it’s going to be him over Hodson.

The other big question that remains to be seen is how much creative control the pair will actually have. The biggest issue that leads to big franchise movies crashing and burning is studio interference (The Rise of Skywalker, Solo, The Flash, Captain America: Brave New World, among others) so if you’re looking for a system director, I don’t know that Muschietti is the person. That said, the internet likes to scapegoat women for things, which makes sense as to why Hodson is the person being preemptively blamed for the failings of a movie that's multiple years out from release.

The Brave and the Bold is currently in development from DC Studios.