To be honest I don't see that the Avengers has a massive bearing has on this idea. If it has any the only thing it has done is serve to give whoever pitched this idea the back up to say this will make money, which is what the executives really care about and generally the main reason they greenlight any production.
Given the amount of history there is between the two of them in the comics, its dumb to assume that this is a knee jerk reaction to Avengers being any good, being good was neither here nor there, making money was the issue.
The Batman & Superman franchises are a licence to print money, they always have been, which is why they revolve every few years and new ones get made. Don't for a second think quality really enters into it with the top level executives, its about money, its about a return on the investment. You only have to look at the drek that gets churned out, but as long as it makes money its fine. Both franchises have, even when poorly executed made a fortune, they are bankable commodities, so they are always going to be around. If not actually on screen, then being talked about and developed.
Superman was stuck in development hell for years, don't think that it was dead once Superman 4 came out, it wasn't, same as Batman wasnt dead. There will have always been people kicking the idea around, trying to work out a way to bring them both back to the screen. It just took the right people, the right story and so on to bring it together, which can take time.
Its never really a risk to make one of these films, they will make money, the risk lies in making as much money as possible from them. They will always make a healthy profit, the goal is to make a stellar profit though.
A cross over film will have been talked about for years as well, don't doubt it. Fact is though, one franchise was working the other wasn't. You also have the line of thinking that hey we make a ton of money from these characters alone, why make one movie with two of them, we can make two separate movies, one for each character, then we make twice as much money as one movie with two of them in will make. The Avengers effect, if anything, has served to let them see, no we can make a cross over and make just as much money if not more. Plus the Batman franchise has gone into hibernation, this would be an easy way to reboot it if they want or simply use him to bolster Superman. I don't think it would of ever happened had Batman not just made a world wide fortune and then gone to sleep just as Superman woke up.
Plus, don't discount the quick turn over reboot of Spiderman in all this either. That's shown that so many years don't have to go by to reboot a series, you can do it quick, new actors, new story line and it will rake it in.
Oh and anyone complaining about reboots in superhero movies, should just shut the fuck up. Have you read the fucking comics, they reboot and have so many different versions, different timelines, different universes, it makes your head spin. Its stupid to suggest its not allowed to do it once in a while in movies with the same properties.
Its about turn over and having product to sell to a great degree. There are new generations coming up all the time, they get into this stuff, they need to make stuff for them. Sure there is a ready market, they are already hooked, you can stick this stuff out and people, even if they seem to hate them, will still pay out to see them. As we know from this thread
They need new product for the new generations tho, you cant make one Spiderman film and that's it, then show that forever. Why do we need another one, waaaah!! If there is only one, once its been made, released in cinemas, then Blu-ray etc. its maxed out, its a dead property, its not making any more money. Also the new generation want their version and why shouldn't they.
The appetite for comicbook movies is massive right now, as long as the bubble keeps expanding they will keep being made, with varying degrees of quality. There is sure as shit enough material out there to keep them going forever and ever.
The saturation opens up interesting possibilities in fact. As in the comicbook world itself there was a backlash eventually against capers. Writers and artists who weren't so struck on the ideas of superheroes doing daring do started to subvert the genre. I hope and pray this happens with the films. It might lead to the likes of Garth Ennis' The Boys being made or Pat Mills Marshal Law. Marshal Law would be a dream, because it takes Batman & Superman and satirically fucks them senseless. In fact its ruthless in doing every major superhero to one degree or another. For me it goes even further than Watchmen in exploring realistically the notion of what a world would be like with real superheroes.
But anyway back to Batman and the schoolboy. Batman is easier to do than Superman, which is why there have been more made. As he is superhuman, the complexities of bringing Superman to screen lie in fashioning credible adversaries for him to fight. The first set of films did this well enough, with diminishing returns over the course obviously, but they still featured a lot of getting cats out of trees and stopping accidents and natural disasters, which quite frankly are fucking boring to watch on screen. They have to put them in though because its a two fold exposition of his character, that he fucking cant help himself, he is compelled to save people and it demonstrates his powers.
Putting Batman in a film with him opens up possibilities of making him a more interesting character. The political angles and complex issues that he and Batman operate outside of the law, but on its side. they are both good guy and bad guy in that sense. Batman can also act as a foil to show how even though he is super human and near invincible, he is vulnerable at times and there are some things he wont and cant do, despite his powers. Batman serves to highlight the almost inflexible moral absolutism he very often represents, which we haven't really seen on film. Superman represents order, Batman chaos, putting them together makes both of them more interesting.
A lot of this stuff comes into play and is explored in Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes back, Strikes back is as much about Superman as it is about Batman. Its good and interesting they are using them as the basis. Nolan has certainly done well mining Millers version for his films, don't kid yourself he came up with that version of Batman, he didn't that was all pure Frank Miller, from top to bottom. I don't see why the same thing cant work for Superman.
