You may not have realized there was a DC Studios. Until yesterday, there wasn’t. As threatened promised, new Warner Bros. Discovery owner David Zaslav wants a new era of focus on the goldmine IP farm crown jewel that sparkles with DC characters. For all my snark, he’s right. Long overdue, hopefully given a chance to shine, Warner Bros. is imitating but not cloning the Marvel Studios model. The surprise move sees producer Peter Safran and writer/director James Gunn named co-chairs and co-CEOs of DC Studios.
First, the name change. It’s not DC Films anymore, which by its very name focused on films. As Marvel discovered, if you want a sense of cohesiveness and hopefully coherence in film and television efforts, you need to have one place for the buck to stop. Though many projects remain in the pipeline from the long-ago days last week of DC Films chief Walter Hamada, moving forward things will be… well, we really don’t know.
What we do know is that some of those previous projects are actually being produced by Safran’s The Safran Company. They include the Aquaman franchise and, as a long-time collaborator with Gunn, Peacemaker for HBO. Allegedly there’s a secret project yet to be named. If you need more of Safran’s bona fides, it turns out the one-time talent agent not only executive produced one of Gunn’s earliest efforts, The Specials. For Warner Bros., he also shepherded The Conjuring franchise. I’ll argue the best entry there was actually the DC Comics mini-series that came out last year. Synergy can be prophetic.
Safran even consulted with Zaslav on naming Hamada’s replacement, a months-long process that saw producer Dan Lin in talks. According to Deadline, Safran would only take the position if he could be joined by “…a creative face,” specifically Gunn.
It’s a good move, though it seemed like DC-centered animation was doing just fine. Gunn even guested as himself in Season 3 of Harley Quinn. The animated films haven’t been 100% perfect, but they’re pretty close.
This also means that Guardians of the Galaxy v3 will be the last Marvel project from Gunn. We expected that anyway, given Gunn’s creative success in the DC Extended Universe.
The team’s start date is officially November 1. The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe has shifted, indeed. Can a Gunn work side by side with a Rock?
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