TL;DR: Lex Wins! Gunn and Safran out at DC

Monday, media reports announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran are now out at DC Studios.  People are having a lot of reactions, and so am I.  

Mostly, I'm just, like, "well...  that's probably going to be bad."

But, to recap.

David Ellison is the son of super-billionaire Larry Ellison.  David Ellison was an actor of minimal talent who couldn't leverage daddy's money to have an acting career, and so he got into producing movies under the Skydance banner some time ago.  What is a Skydance?  @#$% if I know.  The company did, however, produce come decent movies.  The Coens' True Grit, for example, was a Skydance movie.  

CBS/ Paramount had floundered for years, first spending a couple decades making TV for people in retirement homes, and then dumping a bunch of money into Paramount+, which we had for a while but was basically just my Star Trek delivery system.  Seeing a vulnerable company, David went to Daddy, and Daddy enabled him to buy CBS and Paramount.  Why would you want this burden?  I have a few suspicions.

Famously, Ellison appointed the weirdest case of failing upward I've ever seen, Bari Weiss, to run CBS news, and now no one watches it or trusts one of the most venerable news sources in the country.  The Ellisons are well-known oligarchs and MAGAphiles, and the concern has largely been over what worldview they'll impose on all works created under their banner.

Meanwhile, for a few decades Warner Bros. has been passed around like a bong at a frat party, despite being a cultural megaforce across print, streaming, television and theaters.  They had the most trusted name in news until CNN became what CNN is now.  

The most recent acquisition of WB and it's many features was by (checks notes) the Discovery Channel, who mostly make make-believe shows about chasing Big Foot and feature sharks once a summer.  I have zero idea how they became so wealthy other than exploitation of many, many people.  I do not pretend to know how any of this works.

I don't need to explain what an absolute garbage human WB CEO David Zaslav is, but he basically always planned to absolutely fuck up Warner Bros. to do a cool stock deal when he sold it again.  Because that's what all business is in the 21st century: people making up stock prices and then engineering the imaginary numbers so people become insanely wealthy doing absolutely nothing of value.

Anyway, Zas and Co. basically put out a "for sale" sign on Warner Bros., which includes CNN, WB studios, theme parks, DC Comics and 100+ years of film history in its vaults.  And because our government is in shambles and being sold piecemeal, Trusts are no longer a concern.  If Daddy has 3/4th's of a trillion dollars, you can easily afford to get your elected officials to look the other way when you own three sides of the Monopoly board.

Netflix made a go of it, but David Ellison, who has done nothing of note since buying Paramount aside from fucking up CBS News and firing Stephen Colbert to make a certain felon happy, decided buying things was fun.  And so Ellison (a) borrowed tens of billions from Daddy (that he'll never, ever pay back) and billions from Saudi Arabia to make the purchase of WB, and (b) swore he'd commit to making a bunch of movies every year.  he also (c) clearly bought a bunch of politicians or had them strong armed, because one day they were all against the merger, and then the next day, it was all hunky-dory to put a quarter of showbiz on the street.  

But this is a post about Superman movies.

So.  Four years ago, Warner Bros. decided to hard reboot DC's characters for live action entertainment.  The idea was a multi-pronged approach across movies, television and cartoons, all of which would share the same DC Universe, which we've referred to as the DC Studios Universe at this blog.  

Director/ writer James Gunn has been shown the door at Marvel after making them billions of dollars via Guardians of the Galaxy and paving the way for Marvel movie for the next decade because Ike Perlmutter didn't like his politics.  DC happily scooped him up and gave him Suicide Squad (why WB thinks Suicide Squad is a good starting point for comic hero movies is beyond me), Peacemaker and, I am guessing, Creature Commandos.  

With a need for a refresh at DC, after season 1 of Peacemaker and Suicide Squad, the WB heads hired Gunn and his producing partner Peter Safran to run DC Studios.  It was a strange fit.  Gunn is a movie maker through and through, who happens to make movies that land well with the masses.

But he never struck me as fitting well into a bureaucratic mode, so the plan to divide the work by Safran handling business-y stuff and Gunn overseeing the vision made sense.  And as a director/writer, he seemed to want to give creators a lot of license to do their own thing so long as it didn't contradict what was happening in other DC movies.  

I won't get too much into box office or speculate too much there, but Superman probably underperformed compared to expectations, and Supergirl tanked even worse than I expected.  Peacemaker seems to have done fairly well on HBOmax, and Lanterns was a bonafide hit.  Clayface has done much better than I expected, pulling in $100 million already.  

But the real deal is that Marvel and Disney+ trained us all to wait to see superhero media at home.  We know we have only a couple of months to wait before these movies appear as part of a package we're already paying for.  And the days of every superhero movie being a hit died in 2020.

Creatively, DC has been doing well, I think.  But that's because I've been reading comics for forty years, and the stories they're telling work for me, partially because they manage to still surprise me.  That's always good, in my book.

But I can't imagine Ellison wanted a loose cannon like Gunn running DC.  And someone, somewhere in WB is probably noticing it's hard to sell lunch boxes of Rated-R movies and shows like Lanterns.  

When Skydance started eyeing HBO, Ellison said lots of things, and all of it seems intended to appease shareholders and people who honestly don't care as long as everything looks good.  What the plan actually is seems like a bunch of stock-nerd junk that's the same nonsense people say whenever they're about to drive a 100-year-old company off a cliff.  But it's likely Ellison's very old father will send him all that money whenever he needs it to keep a stranglehold on mass media.  Hooray, dystopia.  Maybe we should have let David be a movie star and saved ourselves a lot of trouble.

  

Among the promises David Ellison made, like "we'll make 30 movies per year!" (which is a crushingly small number of movies for a $100 billion bill, dude), Ellison also promised to keep James Gunn and Peter Safran on board.  

Monday, that was over with.  Gunn announced he and Safran were leaving WB and DC.  

I want to be clear - all of the nerd sites are jumping on this story and presenting scant evidence as the real reason things are happening.  And the fact is - we don't know anything for real.  Not right now.  Only what Ellison has done and said in the past, and what that might mean for the present and future.

A lot of things likely happened.  Maybe it was one of these.

1)  Gunn may have planned to step away, anyway, after Man of Tomorrow's release.  

Look, running a movie studio is *hard*.  You throw support behind a lot of movies, and a lot of movies that seem perfectly fine just fail.  Good movies fail all the time.  Bad movies do super well.  You just never know.

But Gunn was now in a position of telling his peers "no".  And having to deal with test screenings he knew didn't go well on movies he didn't write or shoot.  I imagine all of that sucks.  

The failure of Supergirl both artistically and commercially had to have been a bit crushing - plus he likely won't ever talk to that creative team again after they squabbled a bit publicly after it was clear the movie was a dud.

And, likely James Gunn just doesn't need more money anymore.  So why live with the hassle?  He can go back to making weird, goofy films with a lot of heart that people seem to enjoy and only be responsible for himself, his wife and his dogs.

Ellison coming in likely made the job seem a lot worse, so it may have sped up whatever timeline he had in mind.

2)  This is all theater and Gunn is being given the usual corporate send-off where he gets money and a pat on the back as he is absolutely fired.

Gunn may have wandered into a golden parachute situation where Ellison couldn't publicly fire him for incompetence, but Ellison knew Gunn was going to be a persistent problem.  

All through negotiations, Ellison and Co. said that they would keep Safran and Gunn on, but that was always very shaky to this blogger.  That sounded like something to keep stakeholders happy and give them a false sense of continuity that Ellison never intended to support.

So, it's possible Skydance just cut Gunn a check and said "door is that way".  And is now spinning things to look like Gunn made the decision.  This is Corporate Face-Saving 101, and I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Variety has their headline as Gunn and Safran were "fired".  This does feel like the most likely case. 

There *absolutely* is an argument that what Gunn and Safran were doing didn't serve the overall strategy of a company that wants to sell cool toys and make fans out of small kids so they become adult fans, too, in the (former) manner of Star Wars and, arguably, Marvel.  I loved Lanterns, but I did find it wild that characters created for 8 year old boys were in a very adult show I would not show my 6th grade nephew.  

At the end of the day, selling DC to toy companies, t-shirt people and as family entertainment has a place in your stack of businesses.  And aside from Superman, I'm not DC studios did that.  Supergirl absolutely did nothing to bring in the children or entice the intended audience.

Gunn released a statement that made it clear - he's probably fine with all this.  Which is why I don't really know what happened.  I won't pretend to know, and likely won't know for a decade, at which point it'll all be water under the bridge.

What is... disappointing, is that Ellison has put in place a guy who seems to have been a functionary in the early days of Marvel, who either left or was shown the door.  Latcham's post-Marvel work is spotty and failed to make any money.  Both Bad Times at the El Royale and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves were middling movies (sorry, D&D was not great, fam) and neither blew the doors off financially.  He then managed to put out Nate Bergatze's first movie and it was absolutely DOA.

But this is how Hollywood works.  And I've never understood it.  A meritocracy it is is not.  What has been clear is that Ellison is not worried about making money, he's worried about control.  He's so wealthy, money is an abstraction, where he can ask Daddy for $50 billion dollars and not worry about paying it back.  

This may be a case where the best thing going is that Superman is effectively in the Public Domain in 2034 (not that I think Skydance won't implode within a few years).

And, yes, I know Latcham showed up on CBN talking about superhero movies for families or whatever.  

First, I am not entirely inclined to disagree.  I have zero problem with a family friendly Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman.  That is a legit path to take.  And you can tell compelling stories for the whole family with these characters.  But maybe not Constantine and Swamp Thing.

Second, I am not going to say associating yourself with any religion is a failure of character.  That's absurd.  I don't know these people.  And I don't want to be pre-judged because of my personal beliefs and we're all doing really shitty if we see going to church as a character flaw.

And let's be honest - even in a worst case scenario, he'd be far from the first bad person working with characters I happen to like.

What I do care about is what happens next.  DC has spent 40 years telling us the billionaires are either insane man-children in rodent costumes or monomaniacal villains.  And now one is sitting on the company.

And I care about what Ellison is doing buying up pop media as well as news media.  A plot worthy of Ra's al Ghul or Lex.