Well, didn’t see this coming. And tomorrow I was going to do a different article on James Gunn’s approach to Superman. Now I have to move the Chapter By Chapter up a day because even going out the door, Gunn’s gotta mess with me.
Surprising news dropped today because James Gunn and Peter Safran are taking the nearest boom tube out of DC Studios. Not that too many DC fans are going to miss them. While Safran has been mostly quiet behind the scenes, Gunn wouldn’t shut up about defending his take on the DC Universe and their superheroes, villains, and regular people. And he’s had a lot to defend because Gunn has made or allowed to be made (and Safran didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop anyone) some of the most bizarre decisions in how to treat these characters.
It’s not quite a post mortem yet. Projects far enough in the works are going to continue. Man Of Tomorrow, which for lack of a better term sounds like a Superman/Lex Luthor “buddy cop” story, and the tale of Gorilla Grodd at college with Jimmy Olsen are still not canceled, and Gunn has mentioned some next project. Unless Harlan Ellison is going to follow David Zaslav’s lead and cancel these for the tax write-off like Zaslav did with the Batgirl movie, we still have more destruction coming for the DC brand, because investors don’t care about the character and still think the Brand is strong enough to weather this level of failure.
Since everybody else on the internet right now is doing it, I guess we also have to check into how we got here, because it’s a continuing list of mistake after mistake, and it started before a single script was started.
Right at the announcement there were issues. Look, let’s stop pretending not keeping Henry Cavill on was the worst decision ever. Cavill is tied to the Zack Snyder version of Superman. You know, the depressed guy who takes revenge on truckers by ruining their livelihoods in the most blatant way possible, has to be talked into being Superman by Lois, and that’s in the good Snyderverse movie. This was a full continuity reboot…or it was supposed to be, but we aren’t even there yet.
We still have to get to the “phase 1” of the Gunnverse. Yes, he was making the same mistake of introducing phases rather than just making movies and shows that happen to be set in the same universe, the RIGHT way to do a shared multiverse and one Marvel Studios started failing when they abandoned it to make homework for the viewers. A Superman movie, a Batman “The Brave And The Bold” movie, and a Justice League movie down the road were expected. Warner Brothers had been chasing their own Avengers since the first movie came out and made a ton of money for being good as well as properly built up. DC’s two universes were neither of those things, but back then we were confused by certain choices.
Swamp Thing has had movies and TV shows in the past, so no surprise should be there. However, announcing a movie based on The Authority in a universe that hasn’t have a Justice League or Justice Society (and we’ll be coming back to that) makes little to no sense. That’s something you put in an alternate universe because the Authority doesn’t work in the DC universe. It’s WildStorm’s take on The Boys that came along with their absorption into DC when Jim Lee took over. It speaks to Gunn just caring about concepts he can push into his style or that of his friends, like an actual buddy cop Green Lantern story that turned into the mess that is Lanterns, a Game Of Thrones style series set on Themyscira/Paradise Island called Paradise Lost, and including animated works but choosing the Creature Commandos as the first released DC Studios project.
Clark putting on his colored costume for this celebration.
Or was it? We just recently had Gunn playing odd games with the canonicity of his Suicide Squad movie, deciding it was canon for no other reason that he made it, and it continued his take on Peacemaker. Jumping ahead a bit, the reason he gave for getting James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn to HBO Max early was that it was necessary to watch for season two of Peacemaker, a show that in the first season was set in the Snyderverse until Gunn took over DC, retconned a season one finale scene, and decided it was canon to this incarnation. This allowed him to keep the same actors he likes to work with, like his wife and brother, or the John Cena take on Peacemaker. And yet that show was not suited at all for the same audience as the Superman movies, so that was just a crock. It was move because the movie failed to make a decent profit in theaters. That’s it.
Boing back, how many of those productions he announced have been made? There’s some issue with rights when it comes to Matt Reeves Batverse with The Batman and Penguin. Greenless Lanterns feels wholy out of place just from ads and clips, then you watch it and get hit with racism, a “hero” who steals the ring from a dead body, and a waste of space cops with rings that create any solid light construct the wearer can think of. Nobody talks about Creature Commandos these days and when they did all anyone cared about was G.I. Robot’s Nazi-killing obsession and Gunn putting himself into the opening credits. I couldn’t tell you anything about it because like most of Gunn’s DC nothing worth discussing has had any impact on the culture and is only brought up due to damage to the Brand and culture.
Meanwhile, my original article was going to be about whether or not Gunn was using Superman to push his version of characters. He couldn’t even get himself to do something with the Man Of Steel until he learned Clark had a dog…which he gave to Supergirl and breed-swapped it to resemble his own canine instead of proper Krypto. He also gave us a drunken party Kara loosely based on Tom King’s take. He pushed his Guy Gardner as Earth’s Green Lantern, while the HBO showrunners pushed their corrupted version of John Stewart into the role of…a Lantern, if you want to call him that. Gunn’s strength as a creator, and being wrong for this project doesn’t make him a bad storyteller in his own element, is wacky ensambles, which is the opposite of what a connected DC movieverse needs. Supergirl feels like a Gunn project because that’s kind of what we have with Supergirl, Lobo, and the girl whose name nobody cares about because she’s not important outside of that story.
Gunn’s biggest success was the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies, with no superhero until they shoved Thor into one of them and not even accurate to the original future Avengers concept. That doesn’t mean Gunn would have been right for running the whole show. There are people who might like Wes Craven’s The Breakfast Club, but it would be for the wrong reasons and John Hughes fans would not be happy. Meanwhile, instead of the Justice League or even Justice Society, we got the Justice Gang, which people have pointed out shares his initials, in a movie that includes a perceived slam against those who called out his pedophile jokes and almost got him fired from the Guardians movies until he found a way to get back for the last one. Those were only brought up because he was attacking fans, which is the only thing he does now when he isn’t working on a movie.
Can we get a Hal Jordan who’s treated as a hero when he does heroic things? And not dead?
Look what he still has in the works going out the door. Whatever he’s writing now, one rumor suggesting a third Superman movie while the second one is still in assembly, the series where Gorilla Grodd, a superape from primate Wakanda (I don’t know if Gorilla City came first but given certain “cultural” BS this seems the wrong way to go right now), goes to college with Jimmy Olsen and hijinks ensues, and Man Of Tomorrow giving indication of having the same issues with Superman’s treatment in-world and as a character that Superman fans hated in the first movie.
We should mention their replacement: Jeremy Latcham. Yes, he was senior vice-president of production and development at Marvel Studios before the Disney deal that eventually changed the way the studio operated. He worked on early Marvel Studios productions including the good Iron Man and Avengers movies, the first Spider-Man co-production with Sony, and even Gunn’s first Guardians Of The Galaxy. However, the comics at both DC and Marvel have burned us so many times that I have to be convinced the new boss isn’t going to be the same as the old boss, or will make totally different bad decisions. Remember, we were happy to see Zack Snyder and his grimdark DC go away until Gunn came in and went too far in the opposite direction. Can Latcham find a middle ground?
And will the “burn it all down” former fans accept anything in this continuity? If not, he has to decide to start over for their benefit and lose casual audiences yet again, or try to save the sinking ship with half a can of old Flex Seal and a prayer? I wouldn’t want to be in his position right now. What was allowed to be done to Hal Jordan and Peacemaker are unfixable, while we can recton away the Jor-El message and ignore Creature Commandos or Gunn’s podcast insisting the Suicide Squad movie he made is canon. Frankly, it’s such a mess that Latcham’s best bet might be to let everything they have to play out, take a short hiatus, and come up with a proper plan that doesn’t involve needing to see everything in the shared universe just to follow what you care about and knowing when to do an epic movie versus a toned down series. We’ll see what he learned, but I’m not breaking out the party hats until I see what’s done to DC next. There are still too many burn marks left.
Gunn maybe going, but not only is the damage done, there’s still more coming. The future of DC outside of comics (and in comics, frankly, which is a different discussion) is still in a bad place. I’m happy he’s going, but I’m not ready to celebrate until I see if the new guy is better. For anything DC, that would be a first in the 21st Century.
