Marvel's Midnight Suns director calls DC's plans "a nightmare" for gaming crossovers
Games and films are very different beasts, it turns out
Not everyone is excited by DC's big plans to have its upcoming games tie into the larger cinematic universe, including Marvel's Midnight Suns creative director Jake Solomon.
This week, the ten-year plan for DCU Chapter One was unveiled with piles of details about upcoming films and TV shows. As part of that announcement, DC Studios co-head James Gunn reiterated earlier assertions that games would be part of the larger DCU, and he suggested that actors who play heroes in live-action films will likely cross over into TV and animation, too - which has led many to assume that this actor crossover will apply to games, too, an idea that's already drawing criticism.
"This would have been a nightmare for us on Midnight Suns," creative director Jake Solomon says in a tweet. "I understand the desire (I think) but movies and games are so, so different. And the pressure this puts on the amazing voice actors in the games space? Different universes. And that’s how they should/will stay."
While it's unclear if Gunn really wants live-action actors in video games, he's been saying for months that games will be part of the larger DCU. Even so, in an official interview, he's suggested that games might tell stories that are related to the movies without retreading similar ground.
"It’s not like we’re going to have the Superman movie come out and have this Superman game come out," Gunn said. "It’s more like we’ll have the Superman film come out, then maybe two years later, we have the Supergirl movie coming out. So, what’s the story in between there? Is there a Krypto game that we can play that comes in between them? Something that’s still set in the world with these characters, but is its own thing. We want to give the prominence to games that they deserve."
That /might/ help the very different production cycles of games and movies from interfering with each other, but exactly how that plays out in the long term remains to be seen. (You can sign me the heck up for a Krypto the Superdog game no matter what canon it's in, though.)
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.