Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Iron Man, Captain America and the rest of the Avengers are heavyweight champs at the box office. But the new year gives them some major new competition in the form of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a group of misfit bad guys.

After years of Marvel Studios owning the superhero world, Warner Bros. is finally getting serious about building its own cinematic universe with a pair of big titles based on legendary DC Comics characters.

Director Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (in theaters March 25) hits first, bringing together Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel, Ben Affleck’s new take on the Dark Knight and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman for the first time on film. Then things get nuts with David Ayer's Suicide Squad (Aug. 5), with an antihero ensemble featuring Will Smith’s assassin Deadshot and Margot Robbie’s bat-wielding, makeup-clad madwoman Harley Quinn, plus Jared Leto’s crazed take on the iconic supervillain the Joker.

So get ready for something really massive, smart and interconnected, Affleck promises. “I’ve been really impressed just as a working stiff to see how they’re doing it.”

In a lot of ways, though, Snyder says these two movies are only “the cornerstone of the beginning” of Warner Bros.’ grand plan, which began with the filmmaker’s Man of Steel in 2013.

This shared saga continues in next year’s Wonder Woman, which director Patty Jenkins is now filming in Europe with Gadot. Solo films are also planned through 2020 for fellow heroes The Flash (played by Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and more, as well as two Justice League movies directed by Snyder that will be DC’s answer to Marvel’s tentpole Avengers flicks.

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“I love Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, but having Flash and Aquaman and Cyborg and to see them all standing together, it’s a pretty dorky and cool experience for me,” says Snyder, who’s introducing some of his new Leaguers in Dawn of Justice.

“Basically every one of those characters has a logo that you would recognize without them standing there, and that’s a hard thing to achieve in this pop-culture world. We have history to draw on, but we also have these new frontiers to forge.”

One of them includes showing off a different Batman than fans have ever seen in movies. Over the years, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney and most recently Christian Bale have entertained fans as philanthropist playboy/businessman Bruce Wayne and his vigilante Dark Knight alter ego, but Affleck brings an older hero to the mix: His is a Gotham City hero who has no patience for injustice in Dawn of Justice, and after watching the death and destruction caused by Superman’s battle with the villainous Zod (see: Man of Steel), he’s determined to do something about it.

“You can see the idea of the innocent being victimized by whatever they are, aliens, he doesn’t know — that’s the thing that really boils his blood, as you can imagine it would,” Snyder says. “Suddenly the innocent children of the world are all of us.”

The director didn’t want a younger Batman coming to terms with the murder of his parents and being inspired to wreak vengeance on the criminal element, Affleck adds. His caped (and often armored) crusader is “a guy who had been through that experience already for many years and was kind of burnt out and asking himself what the point of it all was and going through an existential crisis.”

The actor also sees Bruce Wayne as much of a mask as the cowl worn by Batman and concentrated more on being the man rather than the myth.

“Batman is covered up by a suit and sometimes a car and sometimes a lot of vehicles and weapons, whereas Bruce Wayne is much more naked — it’s just you and a suit of clothes,” Affleck says.

“You can’t really play Batman because Batman is different things to different people. We project our own things onto the mythology of what Batman is, and he has to be able to be projected upon. With Bruce Wayne, you have to bring something distinct and new and different.”

Similarly, Cavill doesn’t make a separation between Superman and Clark Kent, who was seen taking his job at the Daily Planet at the end of Man of Steel. In Dawn of Justice, Clark and Bruce have confrontations in costume and out, since Superman is equally irked that Batman doesn’t have criminals’ civil liberties in mind as a one-man army. (They both get on the same page soon enough when they see young ne’er-do-well Lex Luthor, played by Jesse Eisenberg, up to no good.)

Batman v Superman is very much about humanity’s perspective on the Man of Steel, Cavill says, and when he faces Batman, the last son of Krypton knows he can put him in the ground — a weakness exploited by Affleck’s savvy do-gooder.

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“He can sure as hell take Batman out if he wants to, and Batman takes advantage of that,” Cavill says, comparing Superman’s constrained Clark Kent side to a dad playing football with a bunch of children.

“He’s not going to go all-out against the kids because he’ll end up smashing people around. It’s the idea of still wanting to have fun but no one gets hurt, so you’re being careful about where your knees and elbows are going. That’s what Clark is for me, but Superman is far more relaxed. Superman is dad just being dad at home.”

The new DC movies are all about introducing new characters, and Snyder is especially excited about unleashing Wonder Woman, who has a small role in Dawn of Justice but a bigger part to play in the larger universe. “She’s a powerful female superhero, which is a thing we haven’t had for a while,” Snyder says. “She’s a piece of IP that basically exists in pop culture in a way where every kid’s got a Wonder Woman T-shirt and they don’t really know why. I want to give the why back to that.”

Then there’s Suicide Squad, which offers arguably the most colorful group of villains ever seen in a movie. And Ayer loved every minute with them. “We all need good guys and everything — yay, good guys — but at the end of the day, they’re kinda boring,” the Fury director says. “They’re always going to do the right thing. When you’re dealing with the baddies, it’s easy to get ahead of the audience and invert expectations.”

Deadshot, Harley, Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and Katana (Karen Fukuhara) are part of a team put together by government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) to deal with a mysterious adversary in the movie, which also showcases a Joker played by Leto who transcends being bad or even evil, Ayer says. “He’s the king of Planet Joker.”

When you have Batman’s archnemesis, the hero himself can’t be far behind, and one of Ayer’s favorite days was filming Affleck’s part in Suicide Squad. “We made him fight,” the director says with a laugh. “He’s awesome (as Batman). ... You really sense that but for the grace of God he himself would be doing some really foul stuff out in the world.”

Affleck says he’s “bound by nondisclosure clauses a mile long” but is willing to spill the news that Suicide Squad is bound to blow people away. “It felt like I have such a cool cousin. This thing that is so awesome is somehow related to me, and that was really exciting because it started to feel like a constellation of things, and I’ve never had that feeling.”

The major players are excited by these films, but will it satisfy audiences ravenous for superheroes? Not only is DC bringing out the old and the new in 2016, but so is Marvel, with Captain America: Civil War (May 6) featuring Chris Evans as Captain America and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, and Doctor Strange (Nov. 4) starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular sorcerer supreme.

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Any movie with Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman sharing screen time is “a historic moment,” says Erik Davis, managing editor for Fandango.com and Movies.com. Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad are films “not only meant to launch a new cinematic universe, but do so in a crowded superhero marketplace. Fortunately it's a hungry marketplace, and DC's rougher, riskier, grittier vibe might be key in growing the genre."

“DC has a huge opportunity to pave their own road, separate from Marvel in tone and strategy. Look for them to take bigger risks with their characters and stories, and maybe emerge as the edgier alternative to Marvel's movies.”

Just three DC movies in, Ayer appreciates the reverence to the source material and importance of getting characters right. “For me, it’s a little more than just dropping a cut scene in the end credits to link projects,” he says. “You really have to be thinking three movies downrange and how today’s movie will impact more later-cycle projects.”

Snyder, who’s also a producer on Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman, also believes these films will differentiate themselves from the superhero pack by embracing Warner Bros' “pedigree of epicness” from franchises such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. “It’s our belief and our goal to honor the legacy of the studio with a batch of films that speaks to that world.”

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And no one is more excited about seeing the possibility of Superman meeting, say, Harley Quinn than the guy wearing the big "S" on his chest.

“There’s a whole world of fantasy in comic books, and if you just focus on one small portion of it, you’re never going to get the full magic of it,” Cavill says. “Now that we’re introducing all these other characters and really building the universe to a far larger place than just a simple alien’s life on Earth, it really makes it extraordinarily interesting.”