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!
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