I wanted James Gunn’s DC to work.
After years of false starts and fights over which universe counted, a filmmaker with real sensibility took the keys. Peter Safran ran the business. On paper, it was a beautiful arrangement.
The January 2023 lineup made me hungrier. Superman at the center. A Batman movie with Robin and the Bat-Family. Hal Jordan and John Stewart in Lanterns. Supergirl? Ok. Swamp Thing? Yes, please!!! Big names for the broad public, weird stuff to show them what’s really possible.
Then the projects started arriving, and it was pretty much all downhill from there.
Man of Tomorrow wrapped principal photography in August and lands July 9, 2027, right as Gunn and Safran’s contracts reportedly run out. Bloomberg Businessweek says spring 2027. Jeff Sneider claims an extension in August 2026, and nobody can tell you whether that’s a new deal or the old one. Skydance has a question to answer either way: has Gunn earned another contract running DC Studios?
I say no.
Good rules, rotten judgment
The philosophy is sound. At the 2023 announcement, Safran said DC was “never going to put a project into production before the script is right.” Good. Once a studio locks a release date and a merchandising calendar, it starts manufacturing movies to hit the schedule. I would rather wait than watch a studio spend nine figures meeting deadlines.
Gunn is also right that each project should justify itself. Defending Clayface in October, he objected to the idea that “individual stories aren’t meaningful unless they lead to something else.” Recent MCU shows and movies felt like homework, all promising something big…later. Nobody wants that.
The rules are fine. The judgment applying them is a wreck. “The script is finished” is a condition. “The script is good” is a verdict. “Enough people will want this version of this character at this price” is a different verdict entirely.
A finished screenplay is a lousy substitute for a good one. Can James Gunn tell the difference?
The audience comes with the characters
Gunn has a point about the tiresome “who asked for this” complaint. Challenged over Clayface, he cited Back to the Future, Casablanca and The Matrix and rejected the idea that the public should vote properties into production. A studio that waits for a purchase order makes familiar movies and no surprises.
Then he picked the wrong examples. Nobody walked into Back to the Future carrying decades of childhood affection for Marty McFly. Superman shows up with that affection attached. So do Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. Buy a property because people care about it, and their reasons for caring come with the purchase. You don’t get to use recognition to sell the ticket and then act offended when the customer expects more than a costume.
A provocative take can thrill readers who already know the traditional version. Making it a legacy hero’s first impression on screen is a much bigger job. Clayface has room for experiments. Superman and Supergirl do not. “It happened in the comics” is a citation, not a business case.
Creature Commandos was the warning shot
The first official entry in the new continuity was a TV-MA animated series full of graphic violence, sexual material and strong language. An adult monster show has every right to exist. See also the glory that is Primal.
So, DC’s big mythic reboot opened with a cartoon about monsters swearing at each other. Welcome to the new DC.
Nielsen saw no breakthrough. The show missed the streaming top ten in its premiere week, and later coverage reports it never charted during its run. Max renewed it anyway.
I’ll plant a flag: functioning adults don’t like watching cartoons screw. We endure it as a side dish in an otherwise outstanding show. Weak sauce like Creature Commandos builds the whole meal around it.
Superman was the invitation, with fine print
The fine print was a PG-13 for violence, action and language. Common Sense Media says ages 12 and up. Plugged In objected to harsher language than parents expect from this character. Parents with six-year-olds were not the target audience.
For the most natural parent-and-child movie DC owns, that is, to borrow a phrase from Lois Lane, a "galactically stupid" strategy. The film has real kindness and aspirational heroism. Why shut out part of the audience? What did the language add?
For all that, Superman did…ok. It finished with $354.2 million domestic and $618.7 million worldwide, according to The Numbers, and scored 83 percent with critics and 90 percent with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
It also cost real money: a reported $225 million to make, plus about $125 million in worldwide marketing per Forbes, citing Variety. That money didn’t buy what it should have.
For contrast, Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to about $360 million domestic, more than Superman made in its entire domestic run. Superman even landed below the divisive Man of Steel worldwide.
Worse, The Batman cost a reported $200 million and made $369.3 million domestic and $772.2 million worldwide in its original run. The cheaper Bat-movie beat Superman at home and abroad. Tell me DC’s commercial strength is fully restored when the other DC franchise already does better for less.
Ticket prices make the domestic picture uglier. At 2013’s average of $8.13, Man of Steel sold roughly 35.8 million tickets. The Batman, at $10.53 in 2022, sold roughly 35.1 million. Superman, at an estimated $11.50 for 2025, sold roughly 30.8 million. By that napkin math, the reboot meant to fix DC sold about 14 percent fewer tickets than Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
So Superman sort of restored franchise viability and kind of earned goodwill. Enough for a sequel? Kind of? Sort of?
Too juvenile for adults, too mature for kids
Peacemaker returned for season two with a TV-MA rating and an opening orgy, right after DC spent a fortune persuading families to try Superman. Somebody looked at that calendar and decided the family audience could wait outside.
Like Creature Commandos before it, it was too juvenile for adults and too mature for kids. The DCU keeps landing there. Violence, sex and language push children out, while the adolescent comic sensibility gives other adults little reason to come in. If these two shows teach us anything, it’s that adult content and adult sophistication are not the same thing.
Peacemaker’s numbers are unimpressive. Its second-season finale week, October 6–12, 2025, put it at No. 10 on Nielsen’s originals chart with 398 million minutes across all 16 available episodes, about 42 percent of that from the finale. Good enough, I guess???
Supergirl puts the greenlight on trial
Supergirl is the problem nobody can wave away. The Numbers lists a $170 million budget, a $37.1 million opening and final totals of $72.4 million domestic and $126.5 million worldwide. The second weekend fell 77 percent. Spending $170 million to gross $126.5 million is a magic trick, just not the kind studios pay for. Critics gave it 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences 72.
It flopped anyway.
Ana Nogueira wrote it and Craig Gillespie directed it. Gunn gave it his blessing. At the first-trailer event in December 2025, he called Nogueira’s script “fantastic” and said DC “instantly green lit the movie,” tying the decision to the studio’s emphasis on writing. “Instantly” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence now.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it a comic-book movie with “the worst script I can remember.” So the “fantastic” screenplay that inspired such confidence at approval became the central target of a certified super flop.
Finished and good are not the same thing. Gunn’s definition of “fantastic” is now deeply in question, especially after he said The Flash was “one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen.”
What was the script problem? Start with the source material. Common Sense Media describes heavy drinking and threats of sexual violence in Supergirl, alongside the bodily-function jokes. Bodily function jokes. Hmmm…that sounds like what? Too juvenile for adults, too mature for kids.
The package needed $170 million worth of demand and got nothing close. Whatever bar Gunn set for the script, it was lower than the audience’s.
Lanterns tests what DC gained from the adaptation
Lanterns went after an older audience by another route. The TV-MA positioning and Earthbound crime approach were deliberate, and DC’s original announcement invoked True Detective. Green Lantern offers a universe. How did that work out?
HBO’s numbers, reported by TheWrap, put the finale at 10.5 million viewers globally and 7.2 million in the U.S. over three days. Those are HBO’s figures on HBO’s terms. Nielsen, which tracks weekly U.S. TV viewing minutes across all available episodes, tells a less triumphant story.
Lanterns missed the acquired top ten at first, then entered at 500 million minutes for August 31–September 6 and crept to 525, 534 and 546 million over the next three weeks. Then came finale week, September 28–October 4, and Lanterns fell off the chart, with the No. 10 title at 536 million. The Sunday finale had only its opening night in that window.
The next window, October 5–11, gave the complete season a full week after finale night. Lanterns still wasn’t there, and the chart bottomed out at Young Sheldon’s 475 million minutes. Against the 546 million peak, that is a drop of at least 13 percent. No binge bump, no return to the midseason high, and the entire season sitting there waiting.
As of October 27, no second season is greenlit. Safran says it depends on whether DC can come up with “a worthy successor to a beloved and great first season,” which sounds an awful lot like a note to the writers.
Clayface makes the easy defense harder
Clayface looks like the sensible exception at first. A smaller budget makes surviving modest demand easier. Modest demand for a DCU film is still a problem.
Good reviews, and it opened to just $24.0 million domestic. Morbius opened to $39.0 million. Yes, that Morbius, the movie that became an online punch line. It out-opened Clayface by roughly 63 percent. Losing to Morbius is a strange way to prove the public has rediscovered its appetite for DC.
Other Mommy is the more current problem. It opened to $27.8 million two weeks before Clayface, on a reported $19 million budget, also R-rated, in slightly fewer theaters. It had no giant superhero brand, no heavily promoted universe and a poor reception, and it still out-opened Clayface while costing less than half as much to make.
Scott Mendelson called Clayface the “latest victim of superhero indifference” in his October 25 analysis, arguing that a DC horror film opening at ordinary R-rated horror levels raises doubts about the lift the superhero label adds. Spider-Man’s $360 million opening says the label still sells. Being a DCU movie isn’t enough.
Even if Clayface nears breaking even, “We got most of the money back” is a salvage report. The disturbing part is that DC can now release a good movie and watch it flop.
What would Skydance be paying to keep?
Warner Bros. now sits inside the combined Skydance company, which has to decide what this collection of characters is earning. Early-October reporting said David Ellison wants Gunn and Safran to stay. The next round of results has to earn that.
The job DC still needs done
Strip it down and the slate keeps failing the same three tests. Gunn mistakes adult content for adult sophistication, and gets shows that lock kids out without giving grown-ups anything smarter. He mistakes a finished script for a good one, and Supergirl was “fantastic” right up until audiences saw it. He mistakes niche for broad, and keeps handing legacy heroes to crowds that a monster cartoon and a crime scene were never going to bring in.
Those are judgment calls, and judgment is the job of the person running the studio. Man of Tomorrow is in the can, so Skydance isn’t deciding the fate of a movie. It is deciding who picks the next one. A hit sequel makes a good day for Gunn the director. It doesn’t pay for Supergirl, prove the adult-TV strategy broadened the audience or fix Clayface’s math.
The sound rules stay: finish the scripts, make every story worth watching, give filmmakers room. Add a clear sense of who wants each project, and make welcoming families a priority. That was the promise in the initial lineup: big heroes drawing people in, stranger projects giving them somewhere new to go.
One Superman movie can’t carry a universe. DC needs new blood.
Let Gunn keep the cape. Give someone else the keys.