Shift change

The biggest news of the week was the surprise firing / conscious uncoupling of DC Studio heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, who've been spearheading the latest iteration of the franchise. It comes just a short while after Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. to become Skydance, and weeks after the pair were said to be staying in place heading up the studio.

Since word broke, the consensus seems to have been that this came down to the box office performance of their three films, Superman (fine, not spectacular), Supergirl (poorly), and Clayface (fine), as well as their place in the org chart that had them reporting directly to the former head of WB Studios, David Zaslav, and which would have them under new bosses. On top of that, Gunn noted that he was "incredibly relieved" because of the various pressures that studio bosses face.

I can't say that I'm surprised that Gunn is happy to be stepping out and going back to focusing on filmmaking. While Safran was in charge of handling the business side of things for the studio while Gunn was doing the creative strategy, helming a film and a studio at the same time seems like ... a lot on one's plate.

Skydance has brought in Jeremy Latcham to replace them – he was at Marvel during its rise, and had stepped back for more independent work and now has the big task of figuring out what to do with DC and the roadmap that Gunn and Safran had put out there.

The internet has been acting entirely normal about this: he's gotten some flack about his religious background and desire for more "family friendly" fare and the usual trolls have been calling for a return to the Snyderverse. The religious thing is just dumb – I think a lot of folks are trying to warp this into some sort of right/left argument, and sure, maybe, but there's absolutely no way to tell until you actually see what he does with the franchise. "Family Friendly" tends to get coded with this as well, but honestly, I think that's not a bad thing to prioritize.

As a parent with a 13 and 7 year old, there just isn't that much in the way of films that we can all go out and see – certainly fewer than there were when I was growing up. Superhero films tend to fit into this well when they aren't going grimdark (looking at you, The Batman), and while that's fine and can produce some great films, it's not a tendency that you want when you're staking the future of your studio on a certain style of film. I imagine Latcham knows this – he was with Marvel during its formative run between 2008 and 2017.

The bigger question in my mind is what comes next for DC Studios. New studio leadership means changes to whatever the prior administration had set out as priorities, but I have a feeling that they're not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater and reboot the franchise again, like they did with Zack Snyder and the DCEU. For one, they've only released those three films, and Man of Tomorrow is deep into production and is slated to come out next year.

But I can imagine that they're trying to figure out how to build off of those initial films. There are a couple of others in development: The Brave and the Bold (which was supposed to introduce Batman to the new DC universe), Swamp Thing (being scripted as of October 2026) and Wonder Woman (which was being fast-tracked as of 2025), and who knows what else that hasn't been announced, and the whole future slate will probably get a harder look with an idea of "how do we really supercharge this franchise"? Wonder Woman seems like a no brainer, as well as pulling out some of the other more popular characters to see what they can do with them. For something like Swamp Thing after Clayface's so-so performance, will they want to take that sort of risk – another horror-ish film with a character that isn't as recognizable? We'll have to see.

And then there's the TV front: Lanterns just finished its excellent first season and left on a note hinting at more to come – it hasn't been canceled but hasn't been renewed. A lot of that will hinge on whatever Skydance's priorities are for how they're rolling out content on their soon-to-be-Frankensteined streaming platform, Skydance Max+.

Hopefully, Latcham will keep the attitude that Gunn and Safran seemed to be operating with: greenlighting projects when they had a good script in place. That doesn't always work: Supergirl was a bit of a mess, but Superman was a perfectly serviceable superhero romp. The nice thing about a franchise is that they live and die by their collective qualities, rather than being sunk by one misstep. We'll see if this changing of the guard works and turns out some good films and shows to watch. Otherwise, we'll be back where we started: a superhero franchise that's getting another drawing board.