Lets Talk About Why I Think James Gunn and Peter Safran Were Pushed Out of DC Studios

I’m here to take a victory lap because I’m so fucking good at this. I’m so fucking good at this. I spent most of my career with imposter syndrome, which I think a lot of people can relate to. Sometimes it takes working with a bunch of really stupid fucking people to make you realize how valuable you are. So there’s my inspirational speech for the day. Know your fucking value.

Now, I’d like to refer you to the Clayface box office piece I wrote on October 25. An R-rated body horror movie about a guy who turns into a pile of mud had just opened to $24 million domestically and $43 million worldwide. Number one movie in the country. The horror fans were happy. The comic book fans were happy. The box office pundits were declaring it a success. Everybody’s happy, right?

Maybe. Here’s what I wrote that Sunday: “Maybe the studio expected a much bigger theatrical return. We aren’t in those meetings.” A little further down: “A much larger return is what they’re chasing.”

Fifteen days later, with Clayface past $109 million worldwide, Skydance announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran were stepping down as heads of DC Studios. Jeremy Latcham takes over December 1. Gunn and Safran are still working on Man of Tomorrow. What changed is who gets to decide what DC makes after that.

What I called was the gap between what we were celebrating on Sunday morning and what a company the size of Skydance needs out of DC. I wanted Clayface to make money. I want studios making $40 million horror movies about characters this fucking weird. And I’ve worked in enough corners of this business to know that the people who put it at number one can go home thrilled while the people who own it are already asking why they didn’t make something bigger. Both of those things can happen on the same Sunday. That’s the nuance I’m missing from so much of the box office conversation. Everybody’s got a phone, everybody’s media, and somehow even the people who do this for a living had me wanting to flip my fucking desk over.

Full disclosure: I’m a James Gunn sympathizer. I’ve known James a long time through horror, and we’ve been close in the past. I’m a huge fan of his work. I love his voice. I also fucking loathed the Snyderverse. Keep both of those things in mind, because I’m about to give Zack Snyder credit for something and tell you where I think James went wrong.

Superman vs. James Bond

For years I’ve argued that Superman is weak internationally for a character you’re asking to carry a $200 million movie. Somebody will inevitably explain to me that people all over the world know who Superman is. Great. How many of them bought a ticket? Forget Spider-Man for a second. Put him up against one British guy with a gun.

Take the last 25 years of live-action theatrical releases. Using the Bond figures, Die Another Day did $271 million outside the U.S. and Canada in 2002. Then came Casino Royale at $427 million, Quantum of Solace at $422 million, Skyfall at $806 million, Spectre at $679 million and No Time to Die at $598 million. Now look at the three solo Superman movies. Superman Returns did $191 million overseas, Man of Steel did $377 million, and Gunn’s Superman did $265 million. These are actual ticket grosses, unadjusted for inflation. Every single Daniel Craig Bond movie made more overseas than the biggest solo Superman movie in that span. And Pierce Brosnan cleared Gunn’s international gross back in 2002.

Here’s where Snyder deserves some credit. Gunn’s Superman actually beat Man of Steel domestically, $354 million to $291 million (unadjusted for inflation). Internationally, Snyder had a roughly $112 million advantage. Put Batman’s name on the next one and Batman v Superman gets to $544 million overseas. We can argue about the quality of the movie until we’re dead, but I’m talking about the business decision to put Batman in it. Somebody understood the value of having him on that poster internationally.

Meanwhile, DC already has a massively popular Batman. Over on the comics side, look at what they can build around Absolute Batman. That’s where I would’ve started. Make as much Batman as you fucking can until you burn the shit out of it, then give it a break. Along the way, maybe you get another Harley Quinn. People fall in love with somebody who turns up in Gotham, and now you have a reason to give that character a movie. The audience will tell you who they want more of.

I thought it was fucking obvious where Gunn was going. You had Lanterns. You had Lobo. Gunn had already said Clayface had a future in the DCU. There was even talk of Wonder Woman turning up in Man of Tomorrow, although that’s still a rumor. So when the reports came out that he wanted to build toward a Superman-led Justice League, well, no shit, Sherlock. The question I asked weeks ago was whether the people paying for all this had the patience to let him do it.

If the plan was to introduce Matt Hagen in a reasonably priced horror movie, let people get to know him and bring him back somewhere else, then cool. All systems go. Put Clayface at Lionsgate, and I can hear the bells ringing from here. “Ding, ding, ding, we did it.” Put that same $100 million superhero movie in front of Skydance and it’s a millionaire winning a hundred bucks at a craps table. Oh, cool. No, no. These guys want to fucking win. They want the movie that has a shot at $500 million domestic and a billion worldwide. Imagine how many perfectly good movies become disappointments when that’s the conversation around the table.

You want to know why I keep harping on this? Read Skydance’s own earnings release. After the Warner Bros. acquisition and related financing, the company reported $87 billion in gross debt. Management is targeting at least $6 billion in annualized savings within three years and $10 billion in free cash flow in 2030. Now put yourself in the room and pitch them on spending the next several years gradually introducing people to Clayface. Yikes.

Everybody loves a filmmaker with a voice until somebody else has to direct the movie

I’ve worked with the kinds of people who sit around a table and stroke each other off over the characters they own. We’ve got Batman. We’ve got Wonder Woman. We’ve got Aquaman. What have they got? Spider-Man? Thor? Doctor Doom? Why can’t we do what Marvel did? And along comes the guy who took the fucking Guardians of the Galaxy, of all things, and made them pop. Of course James looked like the obvious choice.

But what you bought into with Guardians was a James Gunn movie. He has a specific sense of humor, a specific idea of which oddball character is going to break your heart, a specific audience that responds to him. Kevin Smith, who I’m also a huge fan of, has that relationship with his audience. You know what a Kevin Smith movie sounds like. James? Kind of the same. Kind of the same. The part I struggle with is asking a bunch of other directors to make their own movies while somehow making all of them sound enough like James to fit together.

That’s what went wrong with Supergirl for me. It felt like a James Gunn movie packaged inside a Craig Gillespie movie. I thought hiring Gillespie was a terrible fucking decision from day one, and I say that as somebody who desperately wanted to like the thing. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a fantastic comic. Somewhere between that book and the screen it lost its heart, its soul, its voice, and what I ended up watching was, somehow, boring. It also made around $126 million worldwide against a reported $170 million production budget.

My other read on this, knowing James as long as I have, was that he wasn’t happy doing the executive part of the job. That was my perception. Then he went and said this publicly: “I dislike the at-times corporate nature of the job (thanks to Peter for taking the brunt of that).” He also said, “I’m glad I took the job.” I believe him on both counts. Give the kid who grew up drawing his own DC comics the keys to Superman and of course he wants to see what he can do. Four years later, how much of his day does he actually get to spend being that kid?

James is a writer and a director. Put him in charge of the studio and now he has to be the guy with the passion project and the guy across the table deciding whether somebody else’s passion project makes financial sense. He’s got a Superman movie to finish, other filmmakers who need decisions from him and shareholders who’d like somebody to explain Supergirl. When the fuck does he get to write?

We used to tell actors and directors to do one for them and one for you. Go play Rogue in X-Men, then go make some little indie that wins an award at Sundance. My question now is where the hell that second movie is supposed to go. There are 52 weekends in a year. Give every tentpole a piece of counterprogramming and call it a hundred decent shots at a national audience. How many of those weekends do you actually want for a big release? How many horror dates are already spoken for by the time Universal and Blumhouse settle their calendar? Every Batman movie I’m telling DC to make takes up one of those weekends, too.

And we keep rolling these companies into bigger companies with bigger debts, bigger executive paydays and more reasons to put out something they already own or something they can turn into IP. Meanwhile, open Netflix, Amazon or Apple and scroll through all the benign garbage you’ve somehow never heard of. For all that stuff they’re making, how much room is there for an independent filmmaker, somebody who loved movies and could decide he wanted to make a weird little picture and go fucking make it?

…

I’ve been sitting here in silence for a minute. You can’t hear that when you read this, but I think I’m actually mourning what this industry has become. Take 30 seconds with me. Just breathe.

…

I understand why James took the job. I understand why getting back to making movies might come as a relief. And if you’re a Snyder fan who spent this whole article waiting for me to give your guy his due, here it is: he walked into the same losing battle. I loathed those movies, but he was set up to fail, too.

I’ve seen pundits read politics and religion into the Latcham hire. My knee-jerk reaction? They want movies they can sell to as many people as possible and make as much fucking money as they can. It’s the almighty dollar. Stop overcomplicating it. That sucks for those of us who still dream about making original movies or seeing a studio take a swing on something as dangerous as Clayface. I worry those days are over at DC, and I worry about what that means for horror over at Paramount, too.

Now it’s Latcham’s turn. He’ll announce a slate, we’ll get excited, and one Sunday morning we’ll wake up to another DC movie sitting at number one. We’ll all be celebrating while somebody at Skydance looks at the exact same opening weekend and says, “That’s it?” And around we fucking go. You can change the guy running DC as many times as you want. He still has to answer to the same people.

Here’s what those people have to answer for. Skydance took on $56.9 billion in financing to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. They owe interest on that money, and eventually they have to pay back what they borrowed. Management has told investors it expects the company to generate at least $10 billion in free cash flow in 2030. That’s cash they can actually use to pay down debt. You can see why “Hey, Clayface just crossed $100 million worldwide” gets a different reaction upstairs than it does from those of us who are happy a fucking body horror movie made that much money.

Funny enough, @DCUHypeGuy just shared a rumor that Skydance is considering putting some of DC’s biggest characters back in theaters to build up the value of DC, then selling the rights to help pay down that debt. I have no idea if anybody at Skydance has actually had that conversation, but it sounds like something they’d absolutely fucking do. If I’m a buyer, you don’t have to sell me on Batman. I get Batman. What am I paying for everybody else? Because I sure as hell wouldn’t pay Marvel money for the rest of DC on the strength of what those characters might do at the box office. Put a couple of them in movies that make real money and now you’ve got something to sell me.

So here’s my prediction. Come 2030, I think somebody at Skydance is going to sit down, look at how much they still owe on Warner Bros., look at how little of it they’ve managed to pay back, and ask, “What can we sell?” And that’s when I think they start selling off pieces of the company they borrowed all that money to buy in the first place. Put that one in your calendar. Come check back with me in 2030.

Until then, I’ll be mourning the imminent death of art.

Tags:Clayface James Gunn

Categorized:Comics / Books Editorials