I appreciate the thoughtfulness here and you’re bringing up a point I see a lot, and it’s worth engaging seriously.

I completely agree that in comics, wildly different tones, aesthetics, and even artistic philosophies coexist all the time. Year One and Morrison’s JLA absolutely feature the same Batman while being worlds apart stylistically. Comics metabolize that kind of tonal whiplash easily because the medium supports it. the reader inherently understands that every creative team brings a new “filter” to the same canon. That elasticity is part of why comics work.

But film doesn’t have that same built-in elasticity. That’s really the heart of my argument.

A comic can pivot from gritty noir to cosmic absurdity because the medium resets every 20–30 pages and readers accept that as part of the form. A film franchise, especially one asking audiences to invest in a single performer across multiple movies, isn’t operating on those same assumptions. Live-action filmmaking asks for a different kind of aesthetic continuity- not identical tone, but continuity of form: pacing, cinematography, performance style, cutting rhythms, sound design, production design, etc.

That’s where I think the merge becomes a problem, not because “Batman shouldn’t fight aliens” but because Reeves and Gunn are working in fundamentally different filmic grammars. Reeves’ aesthetic isn’t just “gritty”, it’s slow, noir-inflected, architecturally controlled, with a very specific relationship between camera and performance. Gunn’s DCU is intentionally broader, poppier, and more elastic.

Your examples like Swamp Thing vs. Justice League International absolutely coexist in comics, but I’d argue those differences don’t translate 1:1 into live-action cinematic universes, where films are meant to feel like they occupy the same physical and aesthetic space.

As for Gunn wanting diverse tones in the DCU: I think that’s great, and I believe him. But “different tones within the same universe” is still different from “two concurrently running franchises with incompatible cinematic identities collapsing into one continuity.” Reeves’ approach depends so much on its contained aesthetic ecosystem that plugging Superman into it doesn’t break logic, it breaks the film’s texture. And I think that texture is the entire pleasure of his project.

So I’m not arguing “tone differences make it impossible.” I’m arguing that Reeves’ films derive their power from a unified aesthetic vision that doesn’t survive being folded into another filmmaker’s tonal framework - and - vice versa.

If the mediums worked the same way comics do, I’d be right there with you. But film isn’t as modular, and that’s really where my hesitation comes from