It Took 5 Years for the DCEU to Recover From Whedongate
When a sufficiently high-profile film or series performs badly we often talk about "controversy", rather than "failure", but by now we can tell with some confidence that Joss Whedon's rewritten and reshot version of Justice League was a failure that nearly doomed DCEU.
Indeed, only by now, 5 years later, DCEU seems be recovering from the damage it did.
Now, speaking about controversy, Zack Snyder's DCEU movies really were controversial. But whether they deserved criticisms heaped upon them or not, there is no doubt that Snyder had a plan that was supposed to span five movies, focusing primarily on Superman, not counting spin-offs like Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, and that under Snyder the new cinematic universe had a sense of direction, with all the movies released back then playing their parts in that plan.
Then Snyder left, with Justice League deep in post-production. The studio hired Joss Whedon to rewrite the script and conduct significant reshoots. Whedon created new problems from nothing, pissing off several actors, for example, and turned a flawed but entertaining superhero movie into a flop (if you disagree, consider how badly it performed in the box office, and how far behind the eventually released Snyder's version both its critic and audience scores trail on every rating website).
Among the other ways to make Justice League worse, Snyder's plan and Superman's long-term character arc were all but abandoned. Darkseid, the Knightmare future, and more were totally cut from the movie.
So, Whedon's Justice League was not merely a flop in itself, but severely impacted DCEU as a whole, leaving it with no clear way forward. And bosses at Warner Bros. were slow to recognize the problem, apparently being more concerned with purging Snyder's influence than with planning for the future. For a time, DCEU was floundering in limbo, and movies produced for it remained pretty much unconnected with each other.
Release of Zack Snyder's Justice League was the first sign of the studio's tentative willingness to admit and correct its mistakes. Now we have another one – return of Henry Cavill as Superman, in a major cameo in Black Adam at first and then publicly and officially soon after.
Whether that indicates anything deeper than the willingness to throw the fans a bone or two remains to be seen. After all, Dwayne Johnson says that he had to fight the DC Films boss for that cameo. But at least now there is some hope on the horizon.