“It’s still strange to me that people think DC and Marvel are rivals. Thinking we sit on the Marvel sets talking (trash) about DC.”

-Anthony Mackie, Falcon in Captain America: Civil War.

Movie studios aren’t humans. They’re corporate entities that produce films. But a lack of humanity doesn’t stop them from possessing human traits. They take on the personalities of those that run them. Marvel has the calm, measured strategy of Kevin Feige. LucasFilm, under JJ Abrams, focuses itself on developing the next wave of science fiction directors. And Zack Snyder’s ‘LET’S DO EVERYTHING BECAUSE WE CAN DO EVERYTHING’ approach has permeated the DC part of Warner Bros.

The point of this is to show studios, although not human, are subject to human frailties. In any environment where there is competition – and, make no mistake about it, even though Marvel, DC, Sony and Fox say there is no rivalry, there most certainly is – these petty mindsets can prevail.

And that’s terrific.

The competition between DC and Marvel (and, at a grander scale, their respective parent companies Warner Bros. and Disney) is arguably the most fierce. Their rivalry dates back to the 1940s, where DC’s Action and Detective Comics titles would go up against Timely Comics’ Captain America (which would be rebranded ‘Marvel Comics’ 20 years later). The DC/Marvel feud isn’t a recent development. It’s institutional.

Competition, however, is great for both business and creativity.

For a close parallel, we have to look no further than professional wrestling in the mid-90s. There, two companies competed for television ratings in the (predetermined) sport’s hottest ever period. It was called the Monday Night Wars, waged between WCW and the then-named WWF, and titled for the competing evening time slots where the two companies’ flagship shows would clash.

It was an exciting time, as the two promotions pushed boundaries further and further both in front of and behind the camera. Real-life, backstage defections were monthly occurrences. Wrestlers would routinely jump ship unannounced, famously once appearing on both shows in a single night – one one channel Rick Rude paraded around with DX on the pre-taped Monday Night Raw, while simultaneously debuting on the live WCW Nitro.

It was a magnificent time to be a fan.

The parallels with today’s superhero movie bubble are many. The jumping ship of actors (Ryan Reynolds from DC’s Green Lantern to Fox’s Deadpool, Chris Evans from Fox’s Fantastic Four to Marvel’s Captain America, and, most recently, Sony’s J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man J.K. Simmons to become DC’s Commissioner Gordon), the pushing of creative boundaries (never before has cross-film continuity been so incredibly maintained) and the base similarities of wrestlers and superheroes (strength, costume, and plain, ol’fashioned good guys vs bad guys).

Which is why the studios should borrow from the Monday Night War’s underhand tactics. They should be actively aggressive to one other.

This has already been the case with Fox and Marvel. Both studios own the rights to the Maximoff twins, Quicksilver and the Scarlett Witch. When Fox learnt Joss Whedon was planning to debut them both in Avengers: Age of Ultron, they quickly fudged them into X-Men: Days of Future Past. Now Fox gets to say they used the characters first. Whedon was furious.

More recently, despite Sony’s joint custody agreement of the Spider-Man character with Marvel Studios in Captain America: Civil War, they already seem to be planning a sneaky exit. The long-in-development Venom spin-off movie is back in the works, but, strangely, won’t be a part of the same Spider-Man continuity. It’s a tangled web.

So far, inter-studio warfare has mainly been waged between Marvel and the production companies they leased characters to in the late 90s, when bankruptcy was a very real threat. But now is the time, with Batman v Superman and Civil War within a month of each other’s release dates, for DC to fire their first Marvel-directed shot.

They should hire Edgar Wright.

But why would that be such a Superman punch to Marvel’s face?

Head to the next page to read more, including Marvel’s treatment of Wright in the past, and which DC movie he should direct…