The DCU and James Gunn's Batman Was Dead Before It Was Even Born

James Gunn and Peter Safran are out at DC Studios. Their tenure as co-bosses began in earnest in January 2023 with the announcement of an ambitious 8-10 year plan for DC film and TV projects dubbed Gods and Monsters: Chapter One. Among the projects Gunn and Safran revealed in that original announcement was Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which was meant to serve as the live-action introduction of the DCU’s Caped Crusader.

While Gunn made good on his promise to introduce audiences to new iterations of Superman, Green Lantern, Supergirl, Lex Luthor, and more, DC Studios never did get their marquee character, Batman, onto the big screen. And that, ultimately, may have cost Gunn and Safran their jobs.

Batman is inarguably DC’s most popular character and the one who has been the most bankable for them on the big screen. (Gunn recently referred to Batman and Wonder Woman as DC’s “diamond characters” despite their continued absence in the DCU.) So for DC Studios to not have their potentially grand slam-hitting character in theaters meant they were relying on a lot of other characters, even icons like Superman, to do all the heavy lifting in establishing the DCU.

Not to exhaust the baseball metaphors but DC never hit a grand slam, commercially (Superman did fine at the box office but not out of this world given its cost), and the studio certainly suffered a huge critical and commercial failure with Supergirl. Batman might have helped save Gunn and Safran, but now we’ll never know. Instead, Gunn and Safran kept Batman: The Brave and the Bold in development while allowing a holdover project from a previous regime, Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II, to continue cooking in those ensuing years.

Gunn and Reeves are friends and Gunn has been hugely supportive of Reeves, allowing him to take his time to make the best Batman sequel he could – albeit one completely unconnected to the DCU – while keeping the DCU’s own Bat-project on the back burner.

The prospect of a Batman-less DCU has been an albatross around the studio’s neck since the beginning, something Gunn had been vocal about. "Batman's my biggest issue in all of DC right now,” Gunn said in June 2025 while promoting Superman. And it’s been that way since Gods and Monsters was announced. Remember, Gunn and Safran came to power shortly before the final film in the Snyderverse/DCEU, The Flash, was poised to open, a film that brought back not only Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton as Batman but ended with an alternate universe tag featuring the return of George Clooney’s Bruce Wayne.

The Flash director Andy Muschietti had been attached to direct Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and at the time Gunn hyped The Flash as one of the best comic movies he’d seen. But after The Flash bombed, Gunn and Safran were coy on whether Muschietti remained attached to The Brave and the Bold, usually saying they were waiting on a new draft of the script before making any decisions. (Birds of Prey and Batgirl scribe Christina Hodson was the most recent screenwriter to work on the Brave and the Bold screenplay.)

The warning signs about the project had been there all along. Gunn told me in September 2025 that “plenty of things are in flux” on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and was suddenly cryptic about whether the movie would still introduce Batman’s son Damien Wayne, a character Gunn previously called “a little son of a bitch” and “my favorite Robin” back when Gods and Monsters was announced in 2023. (The film was initially meant to draw its inspiration from Grant Morrison’s comic book run.)

Gunn had long said he had an actor in mind for the role but also shot down fan rumors and reports about one actor or another having landed the part. He also recently said it wouldn’t be long before the DCU’s Batman was cast and that the actor would be closer in age to David Corenswet’s Superman. That, too, also seems moot now.

The closest fans ever got to seeing the DCU’s Batman was an animated cameo in Creature Commandos, and an assurance, as recently as with the release of Clayface, from the filmmakers that Batman did exist in the DCU’s Gotham City even if we never saw him in live-action.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold was conceived in an environment of upheaval and transition between studio regimes and shared universes, and now seems like it’s forever trapped in a pocket between those dimensions, never to be free. I’d recently learned from sources that Batman: The Brave and the Bold was meant to kick off in earnest once Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II wrapped production. Gunn and Safran were aware of not wanting to confuse audiences by having two different Batman actors in the marketplace at the same time.

My gut tells me The Batman: Part II will also be the last entry in Matt Reeves’ Batman Epic Crime Saga. Robert Pattinson, now 40 years-old, has remarked that he’s now feeling his age in the film’s fight scenes, and has also screen-tested to be the next James Bond. (That would be a massive, years-long commitment for him should he land the role.) There was a six-year gap between the release of The Batman and The Batman: Part II – including delays caused by personal matters for writer-director Matt Reeves, which have also impacted the sequel’s shooting – so I cannot envision a world where the new DC Studios regime will allow such another huge gap between making Batman films.

While we’ll have to wait to see what new DC Studios boss Jeremy Latcham and parent company Skydance have in store, it stands to reason that they likely want to launch their own Batman – one completely unencumbered by past storylines and development baggage – after The Batman: Part II opens in 2028.