James Gunn’s DCU Is Perfectly Positioned to Supplant Marvel, and Here’s Why | Comic Con 2023

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

The DCEU movies have been flailing for a while now both creatively and at the box office. The abysmal ticket sales on The Flash – it’s made $268 million worldwide, and has been dubbed an “unmitigated disaster” by at least one industry source – is only the latest blow to the DC military-industrial complex. But under the guidance of James Gunn, DC Studios is also uniquely positioned to turn things around – not unlike Michael Keaton doing a complete 180 in his Batmobile at the most dire of moments – and if successful, the adventures of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest could soon supplant Kevin Feige’s Marvel as the premier superhero movie factory.

Of course, like most of the other Hollywood studios (including Marvel), DC’s movie division is not present in any meaningful way at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. This is certainly in part because of the actors and writers strikes, which won’t allow the people who belong to those unions to promote their work right now, but there are probably other reasons as well why DC Studios, like Marvel Studios, is sitting this show out.

Last year the studio brought Zachary Levi’s Shazam: Fury of the Gods and Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam to SDCC’s Hall H to show off new footage, the films’ actors, and even The Rock himself dressed up as his title character, emerging amid thunder and lightning (and thunderous applause). And what did this Hall H event – which is by all accounts a very expensive line item for the studio – do for the two films once they were released? Black Adam made $393 million worldwide at the box office and Shazam 2 made $134 million. By comparison, the latest MCU movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, brought in $844 million. That’s $50 million more than The Flash, Black Adam, and Shazam 2 combined. As I noted a few months back, the box office doesn’t lie.

Enter James Gunn and producer Peter Safran, who were appointed co-CEOs of DC Studios last fall. The DCEU’s death has been long and slow, and you don’t want to wish that on anyone – or any franchise – but studio parent company Warner Bros. Discovery clearly hit a point where they were reassessing everything (and probably continue to do so). I wouldn’t be surprised if that included not just recasting popular actors (goodbye Henry Cavill) and rebooting the entire universe (it’s now just the DCU, sorry “E”), but also asking bottom-line dollars-and-cents questions like “why do Comic-Con?”

That’s what Warner Bros. has always needed, right? The Kevin Feige of the DCU.

The arrival of Gunn and Safran as the new bosses of not just DC’s movies but also their streaming shows has the potential to finally get the company’s characters on the right creative track. Not only is Gunn an established writer-director with a string of good, popular, and money-making superhero movies under his belt in the Guardians trilogy, but he also worked closely with Kevin Feige himself during his time on those films. There’s no doubt that experience will serve him well as he becomes, essentially, the Kevin Feige of the DCU.

That’s what Warner Bros. has always needed, right? What so many of us have been saying for years? A chief guiding force with a vision. Yes, there are those who will argue that Zack Snyder filled that role at one point, and it’s always going to come down to a matter of taste and personal opinion to some degree as to how well his DC films worked, but Snyder was a filmmaker first and foremost who had some input on spin-off projects of his DC films. He was never a studio head pulling the levers.

In Gunn, you get a creative who also has a lot of experience navigating the studio side of things. A guy who gets what makes these characters tick but one who also knows how to talk to the suits at Warner Bros. That he’s partnered with Safran means that Gunn can also take the time to focus on, say, his Superman reboot, Superman: Legacy, which he’s writing and directing right now, while Safran minds the bigger DC Studios shop on the day-to-day.

But putting aside Gunn’s credentials, DC Studios has one big advantage over the MCU right now: It can use its most famous characters to build a new universe from the ground up, unburdened by a decade and a half’s worth of continuity like Marvel now is.

Think about it: Since Avengers: Endgame, Feige didn’t just lose a bunch of his biggest stars – Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Robert Downey, Jr. (who practically co-founded the MCU alongside Feige and Iron Man director Jon Favreau) – but he also no longer has some of the most popular Marvel characters to play with. Yes, we’ve got new takes on Iron Man, Captain America, and the Black Widow in the MCU now, but the OG versions of those characters as personified by Downey, Jr., Evans, and Johansson were hugely important to the success of the Marvel movies. And they’re just gone at this point.

Meanwhile, between movies and TV, Gunn is raring to go with A-listers like Superman, Batman (at least two of them, actually), Green Lantern (at least three!), and Supergirl, while also keeping Jason Momoa’s Aquaman in the mix (for now anyway; his first film did bring in over a billion dollars at the box office after all) and peppering in less recognizable but still interesting players like The Authority, Swamp Thing, and the Creature Commandos.

He’s also just diving into the deep end of the shared universe concept by apparently introducing a world where superheroes are already an everyday part of life in the first installment of his and Safran’s DCU: Superman: Legacy, which will star David Corenswet as the Man of Steel and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, as well as, reportedly, Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, and Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific.

Is superhero fatigue real? That’s a topic for another time, but when looking at the current strategies of the top two purveyors of comic-book movies, it really does seem like the advantage is about to go to James Gunn. Ironically, the thing that made the MCU so unique – the interconnectedness of it all – has started to become an albatross around the studio’s neck, while the latest wave of heroes hasn’t sparked for audiences the way the earlier wave of Avengers did. Meanwhile, James Gunn and Peter Safran are unencumbered by such concerns, positioned to do whatever they want from here on out, and they can do it with the most famous and beloved DC Comics characters ever created.

The sky’s the limit, Gunn.