Look, I’m not picking on James Gunn. Am I fan of his work? Not what I’ve been exposed to. I didn’t like his take on Scooby-Doo, the Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy might have been good but it’s not my style of humor (did he do the supposed Christmas special? I don’t have Disney+), and nothing of what I’ve heard about his take on the DC universe has sat right with me. I have nothing against him personally, nor do I think he’s a terrible director or anything. However, I have said more than once that being good doesn’t mean you’re the right fit for every project. There are characters I love that I couldn’t write for. John Hughes scored a lot of success with The Breakfast Club and…wait, he did National Lampoon’s Vacation? Wouldn’t have called that but there is still the kind of heart deep down that he goes for. However, I wouldn’t call for him make the same movies as John Carpenter, nor the other way around. Some people are just not the right fit for certain projects.
What you have to also understand is that the DC Multiverse is very important to me…or was until Dan DiDio ruined everything. There’s a reason I have a “Death Of DC” category but not one with Marvel, despite Marvel Comics making the same mistakes and failures as DC Comics. DiDio and his acolytes, the latter still writing DC stories under Jim Lee, took everything that made me a DC fan over Marvel (and I still liked Marvel until Joe Quesada and his “lifestyle brand”, Spider-Marriage hating approach) and tossed it out. Heroes were no longer heroic, fought each other like they were Marvel characters (they’re doing their own “Contest Of Champions” nonsense now with DC K.O.! Let’s Be Zeroes event and Absolute Universe, a cheap and grimdark-ier knockoff of the Ultimate Universe), and just aren’t fun anymore. Trying to see it return properly, which I get more from Batman’s talking car show for elementary school kids over the My Adventures franchise, is something I hope to see. Instead we get Aztec Batman, where some of the most vicious people in history get the Maleficent treatment so we can make the Spanish the bad guys. I’ll leave that for the culture war commentators to tear apart. The point is I want the DC universe I grew up with, from the Bronze Age to at least the Super Powers years of Superfriends, back.
It’s debatable if live-action has ever been that, but it used to be good, used to at least feel like a version of the DC universe I could get into and accept. That’s not what James Gunn has been giving us, and a few interviews that came out during my Christmas push and break show exactly why he’s the wrong fit…from Gunn’s own words!
I have to use an article from Geeks + Gamers contributor Marvin Montanaro because Rolling Stone both wants you to turn off ad block AND pay to use the site. This is Gunn talking about Batman and how “boring” the Caped Crusader is.
While insisting he has a plan for the Dark Knight in the DCU (which just sounds ominous at this point), Gunn’s comments suggest a troubling mindset: that Batman’s longevity and popularity have somehow become liabilities.
When asked what needs to be figured out to make Batman work in the DC Universe, Gunn didn’t talk about building on decades of storytelling success. Instead…well, see for yourself:
“Batman has to have a reason for existing, right? So Batman can’t just be ‘Oh, we’re making a Batman movie because Batman’s the biggest character in all of Warner Bros.,’ which he is. But because there’s a need for him in the DCU and a need that he’s not exactly the same as Matt’s Batman. But yet he’s not a campy Batman. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in a funny, campy Batman, really. So we’re dealing with that. I think I have a way in, by the way. I think I really know what it’s — I just am dealing with the writer to make sure that we can make it a reality.”
That framing alone should set off alarm bells.
Batman isn’t being discussed as a proven icon with limitless narrative potential. He’s being discussed as something that must justify his existence — despite being one of the most successful fictional characters in history.
You don’t survive four generations of humans by being “boring”.
He’s still DC’s biggest property. DC is named for “Detective Comics”, the comic title under then-National Comics that Batman made his debut in and eventually took over. In our cynical age, Batman has taken Superman’s spot as top dog as finding writers who understand Superman is looking more and more impossible. (Now there’s a title I could write for while I could do one, maybe two stories with Batman and the Gotham City Guardians.) And yet, despite numerous comics, video games, TV shows, recent audio dramas, and movies that came out recently and still coming out now to varying degrees of quality or understanding the Dark Knight, Gunn actually has the nerve to say there are no more Batman stories. Watch him call the character boring.
“Wonder Woman I think is actually easier for me, because there haven’t been so many infinite portrayals of Wonder Woman — definitely not in movies, but really anywhere — that there have been of Batman,” Gunn said. “Every single Batman story has been told. It seems like half the comics that have come out of DC over the past 30 years have Batman in them. He’s the most famous superhero in the world and the most popular superhero in the world. And people love him because he’s interesting, but also having so much of him out there can also make him boring. So how do you create that property that’s fun to watch?”
That statement is staggering.
“Every single Batman story has been told” is not a creative insight — it’s an admission of creative limitation. Batman’s endurance isn’t the result of repetition; it’s the result of flexibility. He has thrived across tones, eras, mediums, and interpretations without losing his core identity. That isn’t a flaw — it’s the reason he still matters.
Montanaro is right. I think the problem is that Gunn can’t write HIS type of story with Batman or the Batman Family because he doesn’t believe his style would be well received, which makes him at least smarter than Zack Snyder in one regard. See, Gunn has this problem: he’s only good at one type of story, and one that YouTuber JesterBell claims is not even one he came up with. I couldn’t find the video fast enough for this posting, but she said that the formula for the original Guardians Of The Galaxy, which has become the signature Gunn style in his superhero universe stories, wasn’t even his but the screenwriter’s for that movie who now never gets credit. And yet in his various productions for DC the same formula is there: a bunch of supposedly lovable losers have adventures while becoming a “found family” despite everybody around them not liking them, if not outright hating their guts. That’s what his Suicide Squad was, his take on Peacemaker (which is still more personality than the Charlton Comics version I recently finished reading, but that’s another conversation.), his take on the Creature Commandos, and even his first Superman movie.
Speaking of which, in an interview with Variety Gunn gives further evidence that he doesn’t know how he should be writing these characters because of his other problem: making the DC Universe all about him every time he’s interviewed about it. He even did it with Supergirl and he’s not even the director. At best he’s the movie equivalent of the showrunner, but he says his casting of Millie Alcott as Kara was his best casting move and the movie looks like it’s going to follow that same formula. As for Superman and Lex, who will be allegedly doing the “buddy cop” thing in Superman: Man Of Tomorrow, he continues to make it about James Gunn, part two of James Gunn’s Superman by James Gunn:
What can you tell us about “Man of Tomorrow?”
At its core, it’s about Clark and Lex. I relate to both of them. I relate to Lex’s ambition and obsession — minus the murder. And I relate to Superman’s belief in people, his Midwestern values. They’re two sides of me.
They’re not supposed to be two sides of you, James. They don’t have to be two sides of you in order to make a Superman story, something he said he struggled with until he learned Kal-El had a dog. Then he breed-swapped Krypto to match his own dog and completely altered his personality to his dog over what Krypto has been since the Silver Age. As Montanaro pointed out in his own article dissecting this interview:
That might sound thoughtful on the surface. In reality, it exposes one of the most corrosive creative habits in modern Hollywood: writers who no longer create characters, but instead endlessly rewrite themselves.
The result isn’t mythmaking. It’s ego projection.
Superman is not supposed to be a mirror for the filmmaker’s inner monologue. He is a cultural archetype—an aspirational figure built on ideals that transcend any one creator’s background or personality.
When James Gunn frames Clark and Lex as two sides of himself, he shrinks that mythology. Superman becomes less a symbol of hope and restraint and more a vehicle for Gunn’s personal worldview. Lex Luthor becomes less a cautionary tale about power and ego and more a sanitized reflection of ambition “minus the murder.”
At that point, the characters stop existing independently. They become accessories to ego.
Looks like Krypto didn’t like his portrayal in Gunn’s movies, either.
It’s not surprising considering Gunn also took a swipe at his internet critics by having Lex mutate a bunch of monkeys not to make Shakespeare but to use social media as part of his plot to tarnish Superman’s reputation, made easier when Gunn also has Jor-El send his son to Earth not to survive but to sew his seed and rebuild the Kryptonian race, even if he had to conquer the planet to start a harem. This he still insists wasn’t Lex making something up but his alteration of Superman’s father into a horrible person. We don’t need a new take on Mr. Oz.
Then again, this is the guy who keeps giving his wife characters even when it means filming her characters having sex with other dudes, as well as giving his brother roles in his productions. He even changed Krypto from Clark’s dog to Kara’s so he could use him in another movie, because I guess he doesn’t own a cat and thus doesn’t care about Kara’s actual pet, Streaky the Supercat.
His characters almost always fall into one of two camps:
- Snarky, profanity-laced misfits with arrested adolescence, the same sense of humor, and interchangeable dialogue.
- Wooden, underwritten figures who exist mainly to move the plot forward.
Earnestness is constantly undercut. Sincerity is treated like a liability. Emotional moments are punctured with sarcasm before they’re allowed to breathe.
Gunn’s self-insertion doesn’t stop at character psychology—it extends to the physical world of Superman itself.
He has openly stated:
- Pa Kent was modeled after his own father
- Krypto was redesigned to resemble his real-life dog
- The Kent farmhouse is now a double-wide because that’s the kind of rural setting Gunn personally grew up around
He also made the marketing for Superman all about him, with some suspecting he changed the name of Superman: Legacy to just Superman just so we’d have to call it “James Gunn’s Superman” to tell it apart from every show, movie, serial, video game, and comic also simply titled Superman. This backfired as critics started it calling it either James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn or Superman’s James Gunn in mockery. Though this is the man whose ego also had his animated likeness stuffed into Creature Commandos‘ opening credits, an episode of Harley Quinn, and even Teen Titans Go!. That last one might have been the showrunners’ ideas, as attacking older fans while claiming it’s just a fun kids show is nothing new for them.
He also claims that he sped his Superman movie out of theaters so everyone on HBO Max could see it ahead of his second season of Peacemaker, believing you couldn’t follow his show without it. I’m not following it regardless and considering the numbers in theaters there might be another reason, but going by this one he’s putting his show over the movie and theaters, a show he brought over from the Snyderverse so he could continue making it and filming his wife doing sex scenes with other dudes.
You can listen to Gunn’s full Variety interview as the podcast is on that page, but I will point out one thing he said right.
That idea was Superman is not a god, but a sincere, sometimes awkward moral presence. That became Gunn’s anchor — and he credits Grant Morrison’s “All-Star Superman” for crystallizing that approach. “That was the thing that hooked me,” he shares. “That big lug of a superhero being genuinely kind. That’s what I took from the book.”
Somehow he still messed that up. While Cosmic Book News thinks Gunn will be leaving if Netflix succeeds in taking over Warner Brothers, and legally that’s still up in the air, and believes Gunn isn’t sure about DC’s long-term sustainability, which would be Gunn’s fault frankly, it doesn’t matter. Just as Snyder ruined the first live-action crossover between Superman and Batman, Gunn ruined the first live-action appearance of a number of DC heroes, his upcoming projects don’t look to be fairing any better, and all of it seems to be less about DC than it is Gunn. I don’t know if the Gunnverse has any more of a future than the Snyderverse, but I won’t miss either one when it goes. I used to love the DC universe for what it was. Then it went to people who clearly don’t feel the same, and what it’s become is something my childhood self would never have become a fan of.
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