Warner Bros. — Skydance, actually, let’s call it what it is now — announced Monday that Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as co-CEOs after four years, effective December 1. Taking over is Jeremy Latcham, a former Marvel producer and Kevin Feige protégé, as DC’s new president and chief creative officer. Ironically, Latcham worked with Gunn back on the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films. Small world, no?
The official line is that Gunn and Safran will “return full time to their creative work,” and Gunn is still directing MAN OF TOMORROW, his SUPERMAN sequel due next July. That’s the polite version. Here’s the real one: New owners clean house. David Ellison didn’t pay what he paid for Warner Bros. to keep somebody else’s regime in place.
And look, I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, because I did — right here, back when this Paramount/Warner Bros. deal was coming together. I said then it was bad for the motion picture business, and I flat-out doubted Gunn and Safran would survive it long-term. The trades kept writing “invited to stay on.” Sure…initially.
Now, let me be fair, because I have been fair. I gave Gunn his due in this space when he earned it — just last month I wrote that Gunn gets it, that stories matter more than connectivity, when he was out there defending individual DC films standing on their own. I meant it then and I mean it now. When he talked like that, he was right.
But here’s the thing: The longer it went, the more it looked like a man trying to make himself too big to fire. Rushing MAN OF TOMORROW. Yapping every other week about a DCU Batman — casting that “isn’t very far away,” he told us at the end of October October. Y’all, there is no DCU Batman cast. There isn’t even a finished script for THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD — the movie he announced in January 2023. What there was, was a whole lot of talk that made it sound like the machine couldn’t possibly run without him. That’s not a plan. That’s job security theater.
And that ten-year plan? Let’s do the math on “Chapter One: Gods and Monsters,” announced with such fanfare on January 31, 2023. THE AUTHORITY? Shelved. PARADISE LOST? Reported dead. WALLER? Never even greenlit — Gunn admitted that himself. BOOSTER GOLD? Limbo. SWAMP THING? Waiting on somebody else’s schedule. Four years, three films — and a slate that mostly exists in old press releases. I said at the time — and I’ve said it for years — you don’t need a ten-year plan and a shared universe. You need great movies (and TV series), one at a time.
Which brings me to Batman, because it always about Batman around here.
The single best decision anybody made at DC in the last decade was already in place before Gunn ever got the job: Matt Reeves’ THE BATMAN EPIC CRIME SAGA, with Robert Pattinson, standing on its own. And what did the Gunn era give us on the Batman front? Four years of insisting we needed another Batman on film at the same time. Two Batmans. I called it ridiculous then, and I’ll call it ridiculous now: It was ridiculous.
So, what happens now? THE BATMAN PART II is filming, it’s Reeves’, and it arrives in February 2028 regardless of who sits in the DC corner office. That train doesn’t stop. As for the DCU Batman — the plan Gunn himself admitted had already changed since he announced it — it’s now Jeremy Latcham’s problem. Or, if he’s smart, his opportunity to do the obvious thing.
And there’s a blueprint for what comes next. It’s been sitting there for over a decade. Back when MAN OF STEEL was coming out and Warner Bros. was fixin’ to chase Disney’s MCU, Christopher Nolan told them not to. His advice — David Goyer’s repeated it publicly — was to keep the films their own thing, make great standalone movies, and not try to reverse-engineer a universe. Warner Bros. didn’t listen. They spent a decade-plus, and who in the hell knows how much money, learning the hard way what Nolan told them for free in 2013.
Latcham has a chance to finally take that advice. No ten-year plan. No slate announcement with logos for movies and TV series that will never exist. Just hire great filmmakers, let them make great DC movies, and let every one of them stand on its own. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. It was the right answer in 2013, it was the right answer when Walter Hamada was running things that same way before Discovery canned him for it, and it’s the right answer now.
And let me be clear about something: This is not a time to try to emulate Disney’s MCU… again. That chase is what got DC into this mess in the first place — a decade of looking over their shoulder at Marvel instead of looking at the movie right in front of them. It’s time to stop worrying about “it all must connect!” It doesn’t. It never did. Focus on standalone, good DC projects, and the rest takes care of itself.
And I’ll close with this, because I wrote it right here on BOF just this past weekend, about whether Pattinson gets a PART III: That decision would not be made by Gunn, Safran, and DC Studios. And now, it will not be made, at least it shouldn’t, by Jeremy Latcham either. It’ll be made by us, the audience.
One Batman at a time. It’s not that complicated. It never was. – Bill “Jett” Ramey