Thanks to an unyielding 16 years of Marvel moviemaking, we live in the age of the shared universe. We have for a while, really, but things have now evolved to a higher plane of a desire to ape the success of Marvel’s interconnected texts: it’s not enough to hastily construct your own connected universe in their footsteps, it has to ape the branding. The thing is, “MCU” is simple and clean. Three letters, exactly what it says it is: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some studios just don’t seem to get that.
Enter Warner Bros., who’ve now declared that there is an official way to refer to the collection of films and TV shows that now make up Matt Reeves’ Batman continuity: “The Batman Epic Crime Saga.” Or, you know TBECS for short. Just rolls off the tongue!
The reveal comes courtesy of Entertainment Weekly‘s latest preview of the HBO/Max/the artist formerly known as HBO Max show (see, that’s a whole other branding issue), The Penguin. The first TV series entry in TBECS, it’s also what necessitates TBECS being a thing, according to producers Matt Reeves and Dylan Clark, who use TBECS as their internal reference point for The Batman, its upcoming sequel, and The Penguin. After all, once you start throwing TV shows into the mix just saying “Matt Reeves’ Batman movies” doesn’t cut it. No one at Warner wants the Matt Reeves Batman Universe, or the MRBU. They want TBECS!
It’s just the latest in an awkwardly long line of studios trying to force these acronyms on audiences and fanbases in ways that just really don’t understand what makes the MCU acronym work in the first place. Sony flubbed its own Spider-Man branding twice, first with SPUMC–that’s the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters–and then the SSU–Sony’s Spider-Man Universe–when they realized that naming their movie universe after something Peter Parker does when he gets a little too excited about his sticky webbing was a bad idea. The thing is, no one outside of a business executive at Sony is calling those movies part of the SPUMC or the SSU. Everyone just says Spider-Verse, because it’s simple, it’s short, it’s already part of the language of the films, and it gets the point across.
It’ll be the same thing with TBECS–it’s just too awkward, too flowery, too many sounds to become casual parlance among fans. It’s silly even, considering Warner Bros already got this right with the DCU (or even the former DCEU, the Extended Universe). Will anyone outside of Matt Reeves and Dylan Clark, or anyone outside of Warner Bros. ever actually say “The Batman Epic Crime Saga” earnestly? Probably not. But it is funny to imagine it as a comic book onomatopoeia for Batman punching a goon’s lights out.
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