Is it too late to save the D.C Movie Universe?

I love superhero movies.

No matter how many people tell me the market is now over-saturated, or the movies are too formulaic now, I still get excited every chance I get to see my favorite heroes on screen. Since I was a kid, I've always loved Spiderman, Iron Man, Batman, the Flash and, say what you will about how "boring" he is, Superman. So why is it, then, that whenever W.B announces that I'll get to see all three of my favorite D.C characters on screen in multiple movies, I groan?

The short version is that their movies have not been very good, in fact as far as I'm concerned they're 2 for 5 at the moment, with Man of Steel and Wonder Woman being the only movies I, personally, have gotten any enjoyment out of. But why is this the case? What makes them so bad that neither audiences nor critics seem to be able to enjoy them? I believe the issue stems from two major factors...

DC rushed into this

Now I get it; with Marvel absolutely slaying the box office right out of the gate, and you (W.B) having no major franchise movies with which to carry your studio, the idea of making a cinematic D.C universe must have seemed like a no-brainer, but instead of the slow, careful buildup of a shared universe (the strategy for which Marvel has more or less written the book on at this point), D.C jumped from a pretty solid solo film (Man od Steel) right into a convoluted mess of a team up film.

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, while not the worst of the D.C films to date (that honor goes to Suicide Squad as far as I'm concerned), laid the foundation for the major issues plaguing the D.C movies by dropping us into a world we can't begin to understand. We're told Batman, arguably D.C's most popular character at the moment, has been active for years, but we have no real, tangible context for what has made him the way he is in this movie (ie, angry, alienated, and downright murderous), giving us absolutely no attachment to his character, his story, his motivations, and, perhaps most criminally (pun intended), no attachment to any of his major villains that are set to be the LEADS of the next big D.C movie. In fact, one could say that, knowing now that D.C tried to build its next ensemble movies (Suicide Squad and Justice League) around Batman and his actions, the fumbling of this character's story shot every following ensemble film in the foot preemptively.

One of the biggest draws of the Marvel films at this point is the characters; We love seeing Tony Stark's character arc from selfish, playboy billionaire to self-sacrificing father figure. We love seeing Thor's reaction to the existence of wizards on earth. The Avengers lays the groundwork for the heartbreaking, no holds barred beat-down fight between Iron Man and Captain America in Civil War. These things effect us the way that they do because we've grown to care about these characters. This is the major difference between these two studios: Marvel has carefully crafted every movie since Iron Man to fit into this Universe, to make sense, to introduce characters that we love and care about. D.C, on the other hand, left us to merely assume that the universe existed, to accept that the characters are the way that they are due to circumstances we haven't witnessed, so that when Batman and Superman begin trading blows, when the Joker goes on the hunt to rescue Harley Quinn, when Cyborg is struggling with the nature of his own existence, we just don't care, because the movies haven't given us a reason to care. Want a perfect example of this? Watch a Marvel fight set-piece against one from D.C, notice how the small pauses in between fights are informed by character moments in Marvel films, whereas D.C's pauses are filled with bland dialogue, as character personality informs nothing about the scene.

Misunderstanding their source material:

I don't want to imply here that you can't deviate from source material to make a movie more palatable to audiences (just look at the absolutely fantastic "Watchmen"), but when you're working with characters who are already as beloved as Batman or Superman, twisting these characters into something dark and gritty for seemingly no purpose is bound to alienate your fans.

The perfect example of this is, again, Batman V Superman. Batman's arc in this film is based very clearly on the Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", a comic in which Batman seems to have absolutely lost his mind and gone to his extreme logical conclusion as a character, violent and self-righteous. The issue with this characterization is that Miller's work was a deconstruction of the character of Batman, an extreme and darkly realistic version of the character that, while an interesting read, was never the most interesting or even most liked version of the iconic hero. BVS makes the mistake of not only taking this story at face value to lay the groundwork for one of its central characters, but molds the rest of its universe around it, creating a version of the D.C universe that is so utterly dark, so devoid of color, happiness, and even rational human emotion, that it would be funny if it weren't so unrelenting in its angst, and which now seems to have been without a point, as W.B wildly course corrects to try and make its movies something closer to Marvels more family-friendly style.

Now, I could go on about all the things I've found to be lacking in these films, but I feel I've taken plenty of your time, and critics more well spoken than me have done much more extensive breakdowns of the issues in these movies. So, to finally answer the question I asked at the beginning, is it too late to save the D.C Movie Universe? Well, when you rush your movies to meet competition, and lay the foundations for the universe this poorly, the answer is always yes.