Credit: Gage Skidmore / FlickrJames Gunn has become a polarizing figure in the superhero movie industry as he jumped ship from Marvel to DC Studios earlier this year.
He’s best known for Guardians of the Galaxy, which released Vol 3 earlier this year as a wrap up to the original Guardians’ stories. As the new CEO of DC Studios, Gunn has confirmed that the Snyderverse Justice League films will not be part of his upcoming DCU, including The Flash, which just premiered a few weeks ago.
As he gears up to start production on Superman: Legacy, which will be his first DC project, he’s recently stated that he feels there is too much superhero media between movies and TV shows. He explained that there’s also a much bigger issue with lazy storytelling in superhero films, and that the combination of laziness and excess of media has put the genre in a bad spot at the moment.
He continued,
“[people] have gotten to the place where, ‘Oh, it’s a superhero, let’s make a movie about it.’ And then, ‘Oh, let’s make a sequel, because the first one did pretty well,’ and they aren’t thinking about, ‘Why is this story special? What makes this story stand apart from other stories? What is the story at the heart of it all? Why is this character important? What makes this story different that it fills a need for people in theaters to go see?”
His solution to the problem is to be “very careful” with the movies they’ll be putting out and ensuring they’ll be good movies, not just superhero movies. Gunn also hinted at the possibility of exploring different genres within the superhero realm, which could provide a fresh and interesting take on the repetitive formula fans have come to expect.
Audiences have been complaining about Marvel fatigue and multiverse fatigue as the MCU continues to expand with new characters, villains, movies/shows, and even new universes every couple of years. The studio has released a whopping 32 films and 11 series over the course of the last 15 years, all of which are now so interwoven and interconnecting that each new movie requires knowledge of the previous several dozen.
James Gunn seems poised to dive into entirely new depths of superhero films, planning a universe that will expand across film, television, and video games, starting with Superman: Legacy and Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
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