Is the DC Cinematic Universe Just Cursed?

A hell of a way to start the news week, huh Captain? Barely a full month after Paramount Skydance closed their acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, we have news that James Gunn and Peter Safran are exiting as the heads of DC Studios. Whether you were a fan of Gunn’s approach to DC’s characters or not, announcing a full slate of film and television series only to be forced out four years later with several projects midway through development is a hell of a way to end things. While we don’t know if the DCU will continue or will be rebooted yet again under new head Jeremy Latcham (Gunn is apparently still attached to write one more DC project after his Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow is released), the shake-up indicates that Gunn’s plans will not survive in their current form.

Given how many times DC’s film strategy has changed over the past decade, I can’t help but ask: is the DC Cinematic Universe just cursed? Will we ever see a stable version of DC’s world on the big screen, or will it forever live in the shadow of the MCU? Let’s get into it.

Zero Hour

When Gunn and Safran took control of DC Studios, there was no denying that the franchise was in the gutter. The first Wonder Woman and Aquaman films may have been financially successful, but Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon’s clashing visions of Justice League led to the main throughline of the series being a trainwreck that left subsequent projects struggling to pick up the pieces. This led to a string of films that were all box office disappointments or outright flops, including Birds of Prey, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, and Blue Beetle. There were so many failures in a row that it’s hard to rationalize how the brand managed to stay alive.

Gunn’s entrance was seen by many as a much-needed injection of fresh blood, even if he already had DC experience with The Suicide Squad and the Peacemaker spin-off series. He started off strong with his Superman reboot, which isn’t perfect but got the fundamentals right with a good cast, an optimistic tone, and a fantastic take on Lex Luthor. Yet Gunn’s idiosyncrasies came back to bite him; his love for C-list characters and incessant quirkiness sparked backlash from fans who wondered why he was developing projects about Gorilla Grodd and Krypto while major heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman were nowhere to be seen. The reveal that Gunn even considered a Polka-Dot Man prequel show shortly before this week’s news is hard not to read as hilariously ironic.

However you feel about Gunn’s DC output, the biggest strike against him was that he’d already helmed projects in the previous DCEU, because it made the DCU’s new canon difficult to parse. Warners wanted to reboot the franchise, but Gunn was never going to throw his own film out of continuity, or get rid of the actors he personally liked (or was married to). It was hard not to roll my eyes when we learned that “aspects” of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker were canon to the DCU while the rest of the DCEU was kicked out of continuity. Gunn even had to host a “Is It Canon?” podcast about his own work to clarify the issue, which led to bizarre statements like him being unsure whether the Joker exists in the DCU yet at the same time he claimed that Margot Robbie was welcome to reprise her role as Harley Quinn if she wanted it.

At the end of the day, a majority of Gunn’s plans for DC will never see fruition. He started this enterprise with a highly ambitious (and now we know, overly presumptuous) “Chapter One” plan involving 10 film and television projects, more than half of which were either cancelled or trapped in development hell when the shake-up was announced. It’s a sad state of affairs, but unfortunately for DC, hardly an unprecedented one.

Kingdom Come

Fans of the comics hoped that Gunn’s vision for the DCU would help move the Justice League and their friends away from the constant controversy of previous adaptations. Instead, the DCU repeated a pattern of upheaval and second-guessing that went all the way back to Man of Steel in 2013. Zack Snyder’s conception of Superman was polarizing to say the least, intended to launch a competitor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that instead left many audiences cold to his dour and violent take on DC’s heroes (though it certainly had its fans too). That situation only worsened with the disastrous reception to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the critical and audience reception of which left the DCEU in a ditch at the same time the MCU was soaring to new heights. Just like Gunn, Snyder’s plan was ambitious, with a five-film arc that was supposed to include three Justice League movies, only to be cratered halfway through when the studio hired Joss Whedon to reshoot and remix the first Justice League film halfway through production.

The rest is history: Justice League came and went as little more than a blip in the wave of superhero movies, its only lasting relevance to the franchise being how much Snyder devotees yelled about it until they received his four-hour assembly cut in 2021. The next gambit was to reboot the series by using the Flash movie as a vehicle, adapting the time travel story Flashpoint to reset whatever the studio felt wasn’t working about the DCEU. But The Flash became another headache on its own, with a revolving door of directors and writers attached to the project, including Seth Grahame-Smith, Rick Famuyiwa, and John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein before Andy Muschietti finally got it across the finish line. That’s not even getting into how the movie’s release became a public relations nightmare when lead actor Ezra Miller went on a cross-state crime spree and the third act committed ghoulish CGI necromancy of deceased actors like Christopher Reeve, Adam West, and George Reeves.

The amount of jaw-dropping DCEU behind-the-scenes lore is honestly impressive. One of the biggest movie studios on the face of the Earth (before they were absorbed into the Skydance conglomerate) kept trying to make a family friendly blockbuster entertainment franchise while dealing with situations like CEO Kevin Tsujihara resigning in 2019 after being caught soliciting sexual favors from actress Charlotte Kirk in exchange for acting jobs, Cyborg actor Ray Fisher accusing Whedon and DC’s corporate leadership, including Tsujihara’s replacement Walter Hamada, of creating a hostile and racist work environment, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson allegedly leaking falsified financial information to the press in an attempt to trick people into thinking Black Adam wasn’t a box office bomb. That last one even involved Johnson trying to take advantage of the power vacuum before Gunn’s hiring was finalized by bringing Henry Cavill back as Superman for Black Adam’s post-credits scene, only for Cavill to have to publicly share that he was once again departing the role two months later.

The amount of jaw-dropping DCEU behind-the-scenes lore is honestly impressive.

With all that and how many DCEU films were announced and subsequently cancelled (RIP Ben Affleck’s Batman solo movie), is it really any wonder that DC’s movie universe has never come close to the same cultural resonance as Marvel’s? But now that we know there’s another change of leadership coming, the biggest question coming out the other side of Gunn’s tenure is: will the next era be any different?

Whatever Happens to the Man of Tomorrow?

The next major release for the DCU is Gunn’s Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow. The director will stay with the project through post-production, but with Latcham taking over as head of DC films, what was once supposed to be a pillar of Gunn’s universe will now be a eulogy. In the same way that The Flash wound up serving as a disappointing finale for the DCEU, fans are now going into Man of Tomorrow knowing that it’s the end of Gunn’s vision for the DCU instead of whatever he originally intended it to be. The constant reshuffling of leadership means that like The Flash before it, Man of Tomorrow is in a position of trying to set up new heroes and storylines after we already know they likely won’t go anywhere. What’s the point of getting invested in DC’s attempts at ongoing continuity if they’re just going to be reset and recast in a few years time, assuming they’re not cancelled entirely like Leslie Grace’s ill-fated Batgirl movie?

To be fair, it’s possible that Latcham will keep the current DCU going and not force us to sit through another reboot. IGN’s Jesse Schedeen made the argument that throwing out Gunn’s universe would be a mistake given how recently we wrapped up the last version. But new leadership rarely steps in without ideas of their own, which means the fates of Gunn’s characters are up in the air. Will DC really just settle for Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan being dead if they want to revive the Green Lantern franchise? Will Tom Rhys Harries’ Clayface actually get to meet the next incarnation of Batman? What happens if the next round of talent Latcham hires have their own casting ideas for characters Gunn has already selected, like with Adria Arjona rumored to be taking over the role of Wonder Woman in Man of Tomorrow? They’re lucky Gunn hasn’t cast his brother Sean as the Joker yet!

This of course brings up another argument that has been made over the years: that fans and the press should stop treating superhero projects as pieces of a bigger universe and instead as individual works. I get the idea, I do, but the flaw in that line of thinking is that these things are not conceived as individual projects anymore. Since the MCU’s success, virtually all superhero adaptations are produced and marketed as chapters of wider franchises, whether it’s Sony’s supervillain spin-offs, their Spider-Verse projects, or the DCU. Even standalone movies like Matt Reeves’ The Batman are still part of the same cinematic universe experiment, with spin-offs like the Penguin show at HBO Max and being referred to as “The Batman Epic Crime Saga.” Asking moviegoers who check out Man of Tomorrow to shut off the part of their brain that knows a lot of what Gunn develops in it may be changed is giving the people making these things credence they’re not actually due.

We’ll see where DC goes next once the last vestiges of Gunn’s reign are released. But if DC ever wants to not be second fiddle to the competition, they need to understand that constant upheaval has poisoned the well of audience goodwill. After all, it’s impossible to build something sturdy when the foundation’s always falling out from under you.

Carlos Morales has been writing about sci-fi and comic book movies since 2019, and has read 10,000 comics. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.