In what has proven to be a truly shocking start to the week’s news cycle, James Gunn and Peter Safran are out as the co-CEOs of DC Studios. Stepping up in their place is MCU veteran Jeremy Latcham. It’s the latest shocking turn of events for a division that has certainly seen more than its fair share of turmoil in recent years.
While DC fans are still processing this news, one thing is abundantly clear right now. The last thing the newly unified Skydance needs is for this shake-up to derail the direction of the DC brand. The DCU must continue, with or without Gunn at the helm.
So much of Warner Bros.’s efforts with the DC brand over the past 15 years or so have involved trying to build a proper competitor to Disney and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’ve certainly found success with the various solo Batman movies, but building a larger, overarching shared universe has proven much more challenging. 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t the critical or commercial smash DC needed, and financially, it was mostly downhill from there as far as the DC Extended Universe was concerned.
Nor have the many corporate shake-ups at Warner Bros. helped matters. There have been far too many cooks in the kitchen at DC, which prevented the latter-era DCEU from gaining any sort of storytelling momentum or direction. It’s telling that then-Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav saw more potential in the Batgirl movie as a tax writeoff than a product worth releasing to the public.
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