Marvel and DC’s New Shows Are Surprisingly Similar

The real never-ending battle in comics is not for truth, justice, and the American way; it’s the competition between the industry’s two main rivals, Marvel and DC. Ever since Marvel staked carved out a major segment of the 1960s superhero market with titles like Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Avengers — all of which were, to varying degrees, copycats or deliberate counter-programming of popular DC books of the era — the companies have rarely made a move without considering how the other may respond. Their war is long and heated enough to fill a book (which someone actually wrote a few years ago).

That makes Marvel and DC’s new television series far more interesting when considered together than they would be alone. Within the span of 48 hours, both publishers debuted new streaming shows: Agatha All Along from Marvel, The Penguin from DC. Though the near-simultaneous premieres were coincidental, they do throw into relief how both companies are trying to attract audiences with very similar concepts at the exact same time.

And I mean very similar concepts. Both are spun off from earlier, popular productions; The Penguin sees Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman, while Agatha promotes Kathryn Hahn’s supporting character from Marvel’s hit 2021 Disney+ show WandaVision to the lead of her own story. More importantly, both shows are about villains. It’s a stretch to even call them anti-heroes. “Oz” is a murderer and mid-level mobster; Agatha is a witch who previously tried to steal Avenger Wanda Maximoff’s chaos magic (and even killed her dog).

READ MORE: Why Hugh Jackman Is the Best Super Hero Actor Ever

Obviously, these are not the first projects from either company centered on amoral characters — but most of Marvel and DC’s prior shows and films of this ilk were more focused on villains turning face and gradually moving toward the side of the angels. Two seasons of Loki, for example, transformed the Asgardian immortal from mischief-maker to multiversal protector.

Over at the Distinguished Competition, the hierarchy of power completely changed with the addition of Black Adam, a vengeful ancient demigod who spent decades fighting Shazam in DC’s comics. The last decade has also given us multiple movies about the Suicide Squad, a team of villains forced to work for the U.S. government who begin to believe in fighting for the greater good. The two Suicide Squad films were then spun off into the Peacemaker series on Max, which gave a humanizing backstory to the team’s most delusional and violent member, played by John Cena.

The Penguin and Agatha All Along are something different. Neither one is a redemption story (at least not in the early going). Neither title character makes any attempt to absolve themselves for their past misdeeds; neither one experiences a shred of regret for how their past transgressions played out. Both seek to amass power purely for their own personal gain. The Penguin’s looking to save his own neck in Gotham City’s increasingly fraught underworld, while Agatha sets off a quest to regain the magic powers she lost in her battle with Wanda Maximoff.

With both comic-book giants turning to the dark side at the same time, there may be an impulse to link that choice to some wider societal forces. You could claim that these sinister protagonists reflect some wider cynicism about today’s society; that our world no longer believes in heroes, and Marvel and DC are reflecting that here.

By extension, you could also argue that as the root cause of Marvel and DC’s uneven box-office track record in the 2020s. And It’s certainly true that comic-book superheroes are a concept that’s close to a century old; it’s plausible that the genre’s traditional values of compassion, altruism, and self-sacrifice look dated or old fashioned to some viewers in 2024. (Certainly if you listen to the rhetoric of a lot of modern politicians, those values sounds like anachronisms.)

But the most popular Marvel and DC movies and shows of the last few years have mostly reinforced the classic good over evil dynamics that have fueled the last century of comics. Deadpool talks a big game and uses a lot of four-letter words, but he ultimately moves heaven and earth (almost literally) to save an entire universe in Deadpool & Wolverine. Matt Reeves’ The Batman superficially looks like the bleakest take on the character to date, but the title character’s arc is his gradual discovery that violence cannot be the only response to violence. In order to move forward and actually achieve his goal of helping Gotham City, Batman will have to learn to represent something more than blind vengeance.

Personally, though, I’m not sure Marvel or DC are that interested in connecting with any sort of sentiment bubbling through the zeitgeist. I think they’re interested in profits — and as we’ve already established, a lot of what they’ve released lately has not been profitable. Marvel’s last theatrical release prior to Deadpool & Wolverine, The Marvels, was their lowest-grossing movie ever. The final few installments of the DC Extended Universe, including the aforementioned Black Adam, all flopped to varying degrees at the box office, leading to a full-fledged DCU reboot starting with a new (and, I would assume, hopeful and not villain-forward) version of Superman coming next year.

Between Marvel and DC, supply far outweighs demand in the comic-book adaptation market these days. And that’s before you factor in all of the superhero movies of the last couple years not based on an existing IP. It sometimes seems like a new one hits streaming every month: Project Power, We Can Be Heroes, Thunder Force, Secret Headquarters, Samaritan, a new Spy Kids, and on and on and on. You have to really love superheroes (and have nothing else going on in your personal life) to watch them all.

The solution for Marvel and DC isn’t to stop making stuff; if they stop making stuff they stop making money. So they’ve got to find new and different corners of that market that’s underserved. That’s where characters like Agatha and the Penguin come in. They exist in these recognizable universes but they don’t abide by their standard rules, allowing creators to add unfamiliar twists to familiar concepts.

Whether either or both companies continue these twists over the long term will depend on their popularity. But I imagine if Marvel or DC hits upon a genuinely novel variation on their tried-and-true formula, the other will copy it before too long. The never-ending battle continues…