Damage Control: Why Warner Bros. Keeps Making a Mess of the DC Universe

Director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran’s exit from DC Studios came as a bit of a shock on Monday, especially since it felt like their epic plans for the Warner Bros.-owned DC Comics universe were just getting started. While it was preceded by the TV shows Creature Commandos and Peacemaker, it was only in 2025 that Superman served as the big kickoff to Gunn’s plans for the DC universe — and a very successful one, based on critical approval and box office. Exactly the kind of launchpad one needs for a franchise refresh on the level Gunn and Safran were launching.

And DC Studios has had its successses  since Superman. The HBO series Lanterns, although not as creatively successful as this viewer might have liked, was a big ratings player for HBO and brought the stellar Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler into the DC fold. Also, October’s Clayface just reached $100 million worldwide, ensuring that the modestly-budgeted $40 million stand-alone movie will not lose money for Warner Bros. Reviews for the R-rated thriller have been largely positive, including Consequence‘s.

However, this summer’s Supergirl was an embarrassing misstep. It’s hard not to see Gunn’s role in that, because one of the biggest issues with the Milly Alcock-starring film was how much it felt like a Guardians of the Galaxy riff, supporting the theory that Gunn’s personal style as a filmmaker was now the overriding house style across all these projects. This also felt like a factor on Lanterns, a show that, by the end of the season, felt like it had too many competing ideas at war with each other in the writers’ room.

Gunn’s next movie, 2027’s Man of Tomorrow, is meant to be a direct sequel to Superman, but won’t just feature returning players from Superman: It’s also been confirmed that Lanterns star Aaron Pierre will be returning as John Stewart, along with a (slightly less drunk?) Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El and — in a truly random twist — Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes, a character who originated in the pre-Gunn-era 2023 movie Blue Beetle.

Additionally, Season 2 of the Gunn-created series Peacemaker ended with a pretty big cliffhanger involving John Cena’s titular vigilante and an alternate dimension, which is rumored to also feature in Man of Tomorrow. And Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz revealed on X that a new Wonder Woman may also be introduced in the film (though that feels unverified at this time).

Considering all that, it definitely seems like Skydance is canceling Gunn’s own version of the MCU just before it got to releasing the first Avengers movie. As a reminder, the MCU took four years to get to the “interconnected movie uniting all its previously-released blockbusters” phase — following the kickoff of 2008’s Iron Man, there was The Incredible Hulk in 2008, Iron Man 2 in 2010, and Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, all before The Avengers premiered in 2012.

Of course, when uber-producer Kevin Feige and writer/director Joss Whedon were assembling The Avengers, superhero movies were still the new hotness, rather than the hit-or-miss box office proposition they’ve become today. And DC doesn’t have a Spider-Man to guarantee instant financial success. So maybe this is the right time for the new leadership at Warner Bros. to essentially hit pause on the epic plans Gunn and Safran put into motion, before things get any bigger.

Unlike the early MCU movies — which were independently produced by Marvel, giving it slightly more leeway to take risks — every DC movie was a risk being evaluated by Warner Bros.’s shareholders. And now, following the Skydance merger, there are a new set of corporate bosses to appease.

As Gunn wrote in his statement on Monday, he and Safran aren’t done yet: There’s Man of Tomorrow and another unspecified DC project Gunn is writing, and then “we’ll see where it goes after that. And, of course, the characters we set up will live on.” In short, if Man of Tomorrow is a huge hit, there definitely feels like a pathway where at least some of Gunn’s multi-part plans for DC Studios could still continue. If nothing else, the casting for so many of these iconic characters has been stellar; there’s no reason to let David Corenswet hang up his Superman tights anytime soon.

The last time Warner Bros. tried to replicate the MCU’s success with its own slate of superheroes, it was a roller coaster that eventually culminated in the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, four years after Snyder’s original departure from the franchise. Good movies still came out of this era, with Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, James Wan’s Aquaman, and Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice all having their fans. But beyond the drama of Snyder leaving the production of 2017’s Justice League and Whedon’s ascension, there was a whole other DC universe happening on The CW, which even coincided with Matt Reeves’ own stand-alone take on The Batman.

Gunn and Safran did get close to launching a fresh start — when their vision for DC Studios was announced, there was a promise that this would now be a unified storytelling universe… Except, of course, for Reeves’ long-delayed Batman sequel (which just enlisted director Steven Soderbergh to complete principal photography as Reeves deals with a personal matter), and the spinoff series The Penguin, not to mention all the other stand-alone animated series and live-action projects that had been in the works. (RIP Batgirl.)

Really, for decades now it’s been impossible for DC Comics to have a truly clean slate for a new phase of storytelling, since competing/overlapping projects keep getting greenlit. It’s a universe that, in a way, has been cursed by the enduring popularity of its characters across all platforms.

What all this also confirms is that trying to replicate the initial success of the MCU is pretty much impossible. This is a lesson Sony has also been learning the hard way, with its efforts to create a separate Spider-Man-related universe out of Peter Parker’s rogues’ gallery giving us “gifts” like Morbius and Madame Web.

And even Marvel’s struggling these days, because the most pressing issue is the oversaturation of superhero stories being made in a time when interest has waned, especially if Spider-Man’s not on screen. This will really come to the forefront on December 18th, a day nerds have been calling “Dunesday” for months, as Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three will open opposite each other in theaters. Warner Bros. is also the studio behind Dune. And Dune might be the winning bet.