A weird potential question mark concerning the DCU has come our way. James Gunn loves teasing fans on social media regarding future projects and plans for his expanding DC Universe. DC Studios has a lot in development. Just in 2026, the studio will deliver Supergirl, Lanterns and Clayface. In 2027, Gunn and Safran will release Man of Tomorrow, the Superman follow-up that will pit the Last Son of Krypton against Brainiac. But there are plans beyond that, which fans are understandably not privy to.
The Man of Tomorrow director masterfully operates within that knowledge gap, constantly teasing his audience about future developments for the DC Universe. Now, the director may have thrown us another speculation bone to mull over for the foreseeable future. The thing is, this particular one is oddly cryptic... to the point where it's nearly impossible to figure out what it is about, or if it even has to do with the DCU at all. The director took to Threads to post a single emoji: A surfer.
He didn't add any comments or explanations, simply dropping the emoji—seemingly randomly—in the middle of the day. The mystery kicked some members of the DC fandom on Threads into a Batman-like detective mode, attempting to figure out what the director could have possibly meant by his enigmatic message.
Some of the responses speculated the emoji could have been related to Aquaman, while others, understandably, felt a little more lost:
Some of the responses were also humorous, joking that the DC Studios co-CEO is teasing a new iteration of Surfer Joker and Surfer Batman from the '60s Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward:
The funny thing about this entire situation is that the director previously associated a very random emoji to the DC Universe in HBO Max's Peacemaker. In the show, Adrian Chase, a.k.a. Vigilante, expressed his appreciation for the merman emoji, which then went on to become a bit of a staple in Gunn's social media posts. In 2023, for example, prior to David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan being picked for Superman, the director stated only one person had been cast in the film and used the merman emoji at the end of it, which now seems to have been a tease for Peacemaker's cameo:
While some fans in the replies to Gunn's post understandably assumed the emoji had something to do with Aquaman, that may not necessarily be the case. Given how the merman emoji was attached to a street-level antihero like Vigilante, the surfer one could be related to any number of characters or storylines.
Another possibility, however, is that the emoji has absolutely nothing to do with the DCU. Knowing how hungry audiences are for information about DC Studios' plans, perhaps Gunn decided to post the emoji as a random reference to something that happened in his day or that he thought about, and shared it with fans believing (rightly so) that they would start speculating on it.
If that was his plan, it worked, because now I can't stop thinking about that darn emoji. There's also one last possibility to consider. The trailer for Supergirl is arriving in the coming days—December 11, to be precise. Given the movie's somewhat more irreverent tone than, say, Superman, the emoji could be used in some form in it, and Gunn is simply teasing us with its eventual introduction into the franchise.
Supergirl arrives in theaters on June 26, 2026. Clayface will release on September 11, 2026. Lanterns is slated to come out on HBO Max in late summer 2026.
What do you make of Gunn's tease? Is he teasing something DCU-related, or was it just a random post? Let me know your theories in the comments!