yeah, because they were animated. in fact, they did too much animation, now that's the only tint people see their characters through. the only reason why batman works is because people know batman is just a man and has no real powers. so it's translatable to the screen. and the only reason why superman works is because he's pretending to be a man in the average world while he has powers far beyond that. those are the only two dc characters that will ever work on screen in a live action film. no others will work...
That's not a good reason why it won't it work breh. Why did Thor work then? Oh let me guess he was a god pretending to be a man. A good director and screenwriter will make any movie work. Case in point look at the first Hulk movie compared to the 2nd version. Same thing with the Superman movie that came out in 2007, that movie had all the ingredients to be a good movie but it flopped because they focused on Clark Kent and Loise more than Superman.
all WB/DC need to do is a "World Finest" movie (Batman/Superman) with Batman as the lead. They don't need a full Justice League movie. The reason why Superman movie is so hard to make is he has NO weakness. Superman is like the Hulk in the Avengers movie. He's really great for about 30 minutes when it really means something but you can't have Hulk running wild for 2 hours because it lessens the impact. Since Nolan is running both franchises now with a reboot of Batman coming, make sure its in the same world as next year's Superman. When they get the Batman reboot out the way, make the "World's Finest" movie with maybe a few second tier heroes showing up.
Superman does have a weakness, kryptonite . And they did make a movie about Hulk running around for 2hours smashing things and it was really successful because it wasn't an unnecessary soap filled movie like the Superman movie was.