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October 25, 2022 3:00 PM

In a surprise move, it was revealed today that filmmaker James Gunn and producer Peter Safran have been tapped to lead DC’s film, TV and animation division. This comes shortly after corporate rival Marvel released the trailer for Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
posted by 1970s Antihero (34 comments total)

This is an incredibly good decision. I am floored.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:07 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

we're gonna get a The Suicide Squad reunion we're gonna get a The Suicide Squad reunion
posted by praemunire at 3:16 PM on October 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

How long will they stick with them? There've been a handful of DC movies I've liked, but in general they seem to be second guessing themselves and changing strategies any time a movie or two underwhelms. Like they didn't even release Batgirl because sometime between production and release their strategy changed and it didn't fit. Now they have a new strategy again. Glad they buried the movie out of such a strong commitment to their long term brand!

One classic problem with studio brass in general is that development time is so long and corporate horizons so short. You can get fired for movies that were greenlit and mostly produced under your predecessors.

But also I want to see the Batgirl movie.
posted by mark k at 3:24 PM on October 25, 2022 [9 favorites]

So… chances of a Peacemaker season two actually coming out look pretty good, then.
posted by heyitsgogi at 3:30 PM on October 25, 2022 [11 favorites]

There are reasons for this to make a person hopeful. Gunn is a true believer in comics and a smart filmmaker, thought well of by his peers and by actors. All of that helps.

OTOH, everything he has personally written is pretty jokey and DC has had a corporate boner for that ever since they saw Marvel cashing huge checks from third tier characters Guardians of the Galaxy. I hope they're not expecting everything he green lights to be somewhere on the smartass spectrum.

At this point, it's really too early to tell. I'd like to see some follow-up stuff that tells me he gets it: smart comics writers brought in to consult; films greenlit with very cool directors, assured they will get to put their own stamp on things; and above all, holy shit, we need a better Superman. Sorry to anyone who likes the starched white dudeness of Henry Cavill, but I'd go for just about anything else at this point.

Maybe the most useful thing he could do is something a creative might not be the right hire to get done: standardize the production and FX machines such that you can hire talented filmmakers who haven't necessarily played in a big budget sandbox before and trust that the end product will have a certain continuity of quality.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:51 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sorry to anyone who likes the starched white dudeness of Henry Cavill, but I'd go for just about anything else at this point.

After Cavill's turn as The Witcher, I'm inclined to believe that with Gunn directing instead of Snyder, we might see a much looser performance.
posted by Ber at 3:56 PM on October 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

Henry Cavill confirms his return as Superman (CNN, 10/24/22)
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:10 PM on October 25, 2022

Gunn gets it. But I have approximately zero faith that Zaslav will manage to keep him around, or listen to him, or do anything even remotely reasonable. The guy is a corporate thug of the worst kind, and I expect this decision will be reversed soonish.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:11 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Cavill is good casting, and my guess is that Cavill affirming that he'll be back as Superman literally the day before this news broke is not a coincidence; it's gotta be 100% certain that a new Superman movie is at the top of Gunn's agenda.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:12 PM on October 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

I got my copy of Alan Moore's Illuminations a few days ago and am currently partway through the story What We can Know About Thunderman, which I've gotta say, is having a strange effect on how I am processing the comments so far in this thread.
posted by TwoToneRow at 4:34 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really have disliked most of the DC movies, so throwing James Gunn in there can only improve them/make them funnier, finally.... right?!?
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:45 PM on October 25, 2022

Mainly I’m happy what this means for the HBO MAX Harley Quinn series, on which Gunn was a guest star last season.
posted by ejs at 4:55 PM on October 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

I have very little idea what all this means, but if it means there will be more superhero movies from DC with more and more obscure characters, I'm all for it. I'd rank Black Adam as one of my top ten favorite comic book characters of all time. Have I seen the movie? Not yet. Have I read the reviews and seen the spoilers? Yup. Am I psyched that Dr. Fate is in the movie? HELL YEAH.

Bring on the content. I'm just the right age to have been buying comics in the 70's and 80's, and now all those characters are coming to the screen, eventually. Did I see Eternals? Nope. Am I glad they made it? Yup.

And the sweet cherry on top of the comicinema superhero golden age of film: Namor is coming to the big screen in about two weeks. That top ten list I mentioned? Namor is number one.

Sucks he has to be the bad guy.
posted by vrakatar at 5:16 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Eternals was wooden and terrible IMO, and beyond salvaging no matter how much you liked the comics. Namor is so terribly miscast--again, purely IMO--that I can't see him as Namor. And all the Black Adam stuff looks absolutely wretched to me. "I'm not a hero, I kill people, everything I do is justified by how mean everybody was to me. Hated and proud." Not to be all woke-and-cancellin' about every god damn thing, but I think the trailer smacks of right-wing superhero fantasy, and I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I know, they're all Nietzschean Ubermen, the whole concept is fundamentally flawed, and you just have to let it slide, but I'm not in a lettin'-it-slide mood.

Werewolf By Night was fun, though.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 6:22 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

The thing about Namor, at least the standard path that Marvel movies have been following, is that if he’s going to stay an actual bad guy, they’re going to kill him (which has been the standard from Obadiah Stane all the way to Killmonger, Thanos, and beyond). The list of bad guys that are still alive in-universe is vanishingly small (Kingpin and?). Bad guys that don’t die turn into good guys (Loki, Abomination, Nebula, etc.), which is almost certainly where Namor is going to end up.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:37 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sucks he has to be the bad guy.

I don't think he will be the bad guy, just an antagonist, which is very Namor.

Even when he is a hero, he is almost always kind of a jerk.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 6:57 PM on October 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

Yeah, he's somewhat like the Elrond of the Marvel universe.

With Fantastic Four on the horizon, he'll have to mend his ways to woo Sue.
posted by praemunire at 7:21 PM on October 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Just give us three movies that aren't Batman please.
posted by Trent Crimm, The Independent at 7:21 PM on October 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Just give us three movies that aren't Batman please.

wish granted. three more joker sequels
posted by Bwentman at 8:06 PM on October 25, 2022 [17 favorites]

My reaction on hearing this was that DC certainly couldn't do worse, at least with its tentpole characters... but that's just tempting the fates, and I have less than zero faith in Zaslav. (WRT Batgirl, the best information that I've seen for the rationale behind it being buried is purely for the tax writeoff, although, again, someone who would do that but go ahead with the increasingly-problematic Ezra Miller Flash movie may have something else going on.) We'll see, is all I can say.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:18 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Aside from Harley Quinn, the only DC-verse content I've liked in the past decade were Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. I'm not wildly optimistic that Zaslav will keep Gunn around, but I'll likely be watching whatever he puts out in the meantime.
posted by microscone at 10:00 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

And all the Black Adam stuff looks absolutely wretched to me. "I'm not a hero, I kill people, everything I do is justified by how mean everybody was to me. Hated and proud." Not to be all woke-and-cancellin' about every god damn thing, but I think the trailer smacks of right-wing superhero fantasy, and I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole

That's not the Black Adam I saw Sunday night. Fanfare has some other reactions as well
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:47 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is really going to expand the Six Degrees of Bacon
posted by phigmov at 11:31 PM on October 25, 2022

Nice work on the headline.
posted by Optamystic at 5:25 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I haven't seen the Witcher but isn't the whole deal that Cavil is more like Batman in it, uptight but forced to deal with constant shenanigans?

Can Cavil do a sunnier Superman?

Guess we'll see
posted by emjaybee at 5:51 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

>That's not the Black Adam I saw Sunday night. Fanfare has some other reactions as well

Well, that's good--I'm happy to be wrong about it, I was just getting a bad vibe from the trailer. I am perhaps a little overly sensitive these days...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:46 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was just getting a bad vibe from the trailer.

Nah, you're not the only one. Based on how much the recent Batman trailer seems to have diverged from the actual point of that film, maybe they have a trailer problem.
posted by praemunire at 7:59 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

The moment in the Black Adam trailer that best represents its vibe is the one where the anonymous baddy smacks him with a baton, cut to the baton bending around Adam's annoyed face, cut to the anonymous baddy's flight out of the city after Adam throws him into the ocean.

That's the bit in the trailer that is truest to how the movie really feels. The violence isn't any more serious than in an NES game, and it's usually played for laughs.

I mean, if you had to hang a name on it, you'd call it "comic book violence."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:25 AM on October 26, 2022

Is it me, or does this have a bit of "wag the dog" to it as a distraction from how wretched Zaslav has been at the helm?
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:06 AM on October 26, 2022

It's just you. If Zaslav gives Gunn a free hand, the results should be great. Maybe Zaslav saw what was on WB's plate and said, "We can do better." Or maybe Zaslav really is a total idiot, and putting Gunn in this job is a stopped clock being right twice a day, and it won't last. It's just too soon to tell. I mean, look, maybe the Batgirl movie really is that bad; I don't know.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:31 AM on October 26, 2022

While I had some doubts about the trailer, I confess I did like seeing Hawkman get beat up. I don't know what Hawkman ever did to me...
posted by Sing Or Swim at 9:56 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here is what I don't get. Gunn has said the next Guardians is the last one being made. Well, it is for him, but I would assume that if the third is a super duper smash hit that we'll get a fourth, right?
posted by Beholder at 11:11 PM on October 26, 2022

>> Here is what I don't get. Gunn has said the next Guardians is the last one being made. Well, it is for him, but I would assume that if the third is a super duper smash hit that we'll get a fourth, right?

He has often said that GOTG3 is the last of the films he's interested in making. If there is a GOTG4, it'd be several years down the road and was going to have a different filmmaker in charge even before this news.
posted by replayer at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2022

"Introducing Kevin Bacon" -- I have a good feeling about this Bacon guy. He might have a future in Hollywood.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:39 AM on October 28, 2022