I guess people might reassess them like the Star Wars prequels.
Most of the hate I've seen comes from diehard DC fans in the States. That's anecdotal evidence more than statistics but it's an odd trend I've noticed.
It is an observable trend, though. ZSJL has tons of international fans and the intl. market outnumbers the US one. It was at Number 1 on UK's Official Film Chart for at least 3 weeks in a row, and Chinese audiences racked up absurd streaming numbers in different platforms; on Bilibili they left annotations of "Thank You, Zack Snyder!" on that stream of the movie (rated 9.8 where Josstice league was 3.3 at the time).
It turns out people love a movie that doesn't pretend to pander to them the way Disney does. For example: Disney is totally ready to accuse Chinese audiences of racism and blame them for Disney itself making John Boyega smaller on a Star Wars poster or not showing Chadwick Boseman's actual face on a Black Panther poster. They'll roll with sensational headlines of "Chinese viewers thought Black Panther was 'too dark'" when the complaint was about the lighting of the movie. But they still want that country's money, so they'll remake Mulan no problem. Chinese audiences had no actual issue with ZSJL holding Cyborg as the heart of its story or the fact that it's as much an origin film for him as it is a team-up movie for the rest of the League, given his character development.
I insist that "diehard DC fans" in the States have a primary grievance over Snyder's portrayal of Superman, and everything else stems from there. Especially where MoS and BvS show no grand reverence for the US's way of doing things the way Marvel gives lip service to American heroes and politics. The military-entertainment complex is real, but where Iron Man was tooled to promote the US-Afghanistan war and sell it to a public that was losing trust in the US over it (so this rich American guy in a suit of armor flies over to some "Middle East" country and shoots ALL the bad guys! and that country is never mentioned again in the continuity because who cares?), something like Man of Steel blatantly shows the military making things worse at critical moments (jets spiraling into buildings when they get too close to the World Engine, etc.) and the best they do is a plan that results in more than a few of them dying in the attempt (phantom zone, etc). Clark flew to the Indian Ocean to disable that World Engine rather than the one in Metropolis entirely on purpose. One of the movie's final scenes is Clark showing disapproval of the surveillance state by spiking a surveillance drone in front of Swanwick.
BvS doubles down on the criticism as I described a few posts ago. Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos exist and Zuckerberg is barely considered a human being as-is (and Elon is continually proving himself to be an idiot-- he bought Twitter just to be popular in the internet equivalent of a sewer, after all), people are still salty about Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Lex Luthor Jr because somewhere in their mind they're still invested in the idea that a rich billionaire who doesn't care about human lives is still inherently *better* than a normal person in some way shape or form. They want to believe that the billionaire has something to aspire to aside from their riches, so it makes them upset to see a dweeb who can't articulate a story about Prometheus when he takes the microphone to talk, whose plan revolves around bribing US senators where he can, leading the other billionaire by his Dick Cheney-style xenophobia, and blatantly denying a disabled person his compensation and exploiting his resulting destitute status; they want someone who has muscles, who "is" intelligent, who is in some way "right" about Superman, anything they can justify, whatever. And then fancast Bryan Cranston like a bunch of basic b*tches and revert to when they were young and can't let go of Clancy Brown.
ZSJL is less critical on the Overt American Values from what I remember, but "real DC fans" still swear Clark needed to spout something about "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" because he just has to and cling to the fact that some recent animated movie for literal children said it, because they're more concerned about a hero spouting off a catchphrase rather than the hero actually standing for something and being cognizant of the power he and his home country wields and how it behaves at the detriment of the rest of the globe. Clark saves those in need no matter where they are in the world. "DC fans" are still mad he's not wearing his underwear on the outside. They have their panties in a twist that his character was ever tested at any point and shown to be imperfect, they're mad that the type of power he wields is shown to actually mess up a city (the same way they do in the animated shows), they're mad that he isn't all powerful all of the time and unassailably right. They want
comfort, not
hope. Superman being confronted with terrible situations and handling them the best he can despite his own imperfections is offensive to them, but also him T-posing is bad, because something-something Jesus Christ,
as if Jesus Christ is bad. As if
Superman shouldn't be Christ-like.
But it's okay for Tony to T-pose on an Infinity War poster in a way that clearly signposts his importance to the MCU because IDK he's just that awesome. He's a rich billionaire who's good-looking and f*cks, so it doesn't matter if his character development behind the scenes and on screen feature him pushing Patriot Act-type inventions, inventing autonomous drones capable of deploying from orbit to strike highschoolers on a bus, or him spouting HYDRA rhetoric (see: him delusionally ranting about "
precious freedoms" getting in the way of his plan). It's Marvel and they can get away with it. Just ignore where Infinity War admitted that the only good future without Thanos is the one where Tony also dies, not one where he lives. People don't actually care about what that means.
Anyway, Aquaman 2's post-credit has
Ocean Master eating a burger, watching a massive roach crawl by on the table, and sticking the roach on top of his burger and biting into it.
