In the DC universe, the most evil and morally reprehensible villain isn’t the intergalactic warlord or the criminal clown: It’s Lex Luthor, the businessman. And since life does have a tendency to imitate art, it makes a fair bit of cruel sense that little more than a business decision bumped James Gunn and Peter Safran from their roles as co-CEOs of DC Studios. No epic battle, no heroic final standoff, just Warner Bros.’ new parent company Skydance replacing two guys with a different guy.
Gunn and Safran were appointed to their positions just four years ago, with Gunn heading up the creative side and Safran (a veteran producer) handling the numbers. It was a somewhat unusual setup, but it was the clearest indicator since WB unceremoniously killed off the “Snyderverse” that it actually wanted to do something worthwhile with the DC superheroes on screen. Gunn, of course, gave the Marvel Cinematic Universe three of its best movies with his Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy, and he proved good DC movies were possible with his The Suicide Squad. So if anyone was going to get things back on track, it would make sense for it to be him—to say nothing of how exciting it was from a fan perspective to see a guy who loves comic books being put in charge of extremely high-profile comic book movies.
DC Studios released three films under Gunn and Safran’s leadership, beginning with Gunn’s own Superman, which was reasonably successful with critics and at the box office, even if it wasn’t the generational hit that WB obviously hoped it would be (and can we all agree now that it was weird to start a Superman movie with him screaming at Lois Lane?). Supergirl fared significantly worse, especially financially, and Clayface was always destined to be little more than an interesting curio even if it did make okay money on a much smaller budget than its predecessors.
Gunn and Safran seemed to have much more success on the TV side of things, especially in live-action. Season two of Peacemaker was fun and Lanterns was an interesting new take on a hero who has had a difficult time translating to a new medium in the past, and Cristin Milioti even won an Emmy for her work on the great Penguin show. And they’re not officially done yet, since the Superman spin-off The People V. Gorilla Grodd is still on track for HBO Max in 2027, and we’re still waiting on both Superman sequel Man Of Tomorrow and The Batman: Part II… though the latter is having troubles of its own.
With that much unfinished work left on the table (we’re never getting a payoff to the cliffhanger ending of Peacemaker, huh?), it seems pretty safe to assume that Gunn and Safran aren’t walking away from DC Studios having fully accomplished everything they wanted to do. Gunn made the split sound as amicable as he could in a post on his personal Instagram (which has been the go-to destination for most DC Studios news during his tenure), citing both the highs of making movies and the lows of doing business stuff, playing it off like it’s kind of a relief to not have to do this job anymore.
That being said, eagle-eyed readers may pick up on the fact that Gunn doesn’t mention the man taking over as the new head of DC Studios (a producer named Jeremy Latcham, who does have a mostly good track record) or his now-former boss David Ellison. The Skydance CEO put out a statement thanking Gunn and Safran for their “passion, contributions, and commitment” to DC Studios, and The Hollywood Reporter notes that Ellison visited the Man Of Tomorrow set and seemed wholly confident in what Gunn and Safran were doing, but it’s not hard to infer from Gunn’s post that this wasn’t necessarily his first choice.
So why did this happen? If Ellison and Skydance wanted Gunn and Safran gone because of the kinds of movies they were making—i.e. “Superman is too woke” or whatever stupid nonsense the internet chooses to believe—then it likely would’ve happened as soon as Skydance assumed control of WB. Had that happened, though, Skydance would’ve found itself with a new kind of #RestoreTheSnyderverse backlash on its hands as Gunn’s fans rallied together to express their frustration.
That will probably happen anyway, but Gunn and Safran are being allowed to finish up what they were working on. Man Of Tomorrow won’t end up left on a shelf.
One possibility for the departure comes from the fact that most people probably heard about this news from James Gunn’s aforementioned Instagram. He’s a filmmaker who has fans who will follow him wherever he goes, which, again, was why his DC Studios appointment was so cool. We also know that Skydance is now unbelievably big and powerful, and the company was putting that weight behind decisions that were seemingly made just out of spite when it had only gobbled up one legacy studio. So it’s not really an asset to Skydance that one of the guys in charge of one of the biggest IPs on the planet has both a platform and a fanbase that likes it when he has things to say.
After all, it’s not like Gunn is above sticking it to the haters. There’s a running thread in his Superman movie that people on the internet are really mad about Superman, and it’s later revealed that this is an astroturf campaign run by Lex Luthor that involves mind-controlled monkeys posting angry comments on the internet—a pretty clear indication of how he feels about trolls. To be even clearer: Gunn himself did on-set reference for the CGI monkeys, which suggests that he personally wanted to take a shot at whiny commenters.
And why shouldn’t he? Internet trolls got him fired from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 as payback for his political tweets in 2018, and though cooler heads at Marvel prevailed and he was eventually reinstated, the whole experience probably wasn’t super fun for him. It’s easy to see Superman’s brainwashed monkeys as a silly take on the same kind of toxic, bad faith movement that got him in trouble. None of this is to say that Skydance would’ve inevitably put its foot down and demanded more movies about far-right superheroes (Steve Ditko’s Objectivist version of The Question is back! Deathstroke sleeps with Tara Markov and it’s okay now!), but, even if he never needed to use it, Gunn clearly commands some power in a way that most filmmakers—let alone studio executives—don’t.
Enter: Jeremy Latcham. He previously worked with MCU boss Kevin Feige, and he has producer credits on Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Avengers, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Unlike Gunn, Latcham doesn’t seem to have a public Instagram, and you probably never heard his name or saw his face until today. Also, in another notable change from the Gunn/Safran era, Latcham will answer to the heads of the Skydance Motion Picture group, whereas Gunn and Safran reported directly to Ellison (and, before that, to generally detested Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav). He is clearly and explicitly lower in the hierarchy than Gunn was, meaning it’s unlikely he’ll become a household name to the extent that Gunn or Kevin Feige have.
Also, he just might be a little more amenable to the hypothetical idea of far-right superheroes, with Reddit detectives quickly realizing that Latcham recently made appearances on Christian podcasts and YouTube shows while promoting his latest producing gig: The Breadwinner, starring famously “apolitical” comedian Nate Bargatze. Those aren’t red flags on their own, to be fair, but one video does feature him proudly explaining that his big note on the early MCU movies was that he didn’t want to make anything his grandma wouldn’t like. Say what you will about Gunn and his DC work, but he and Safran had a vision and interesting new ideas, and nothing about Latcham screams that he has either.
What he does have, though, is a “safe” point of view and approximately zero fans (give or take his grandmother), which will be perfect for a string of C+ superhero movies that neither offend nor excite anyone but make just enough money to keep shark-eyed billionaire David Ellison happy. Whatever the refreshed DC Studios winds up releasing could make a Superman yelling at Lois Lane look preferable by comparison. Maybe it’ll even win me over to Supes’ side of the argument. After all, it can’t be easy to have all that power.
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