“The history of DC is pretty messed up. It was f—ed up.” That’s what James Gunn, the co-chairman and CEO of DC Studios with Superman producer Peter Safran, said when the duo unveiled their initial 10-project slate back in January 2023. Gunn spoke candidly about the state of DC’s TV and film projects when the hierarchy of power changed at DC Films in late 2022, with Gunn noting that the DC IP had splintered into everything from the Arrowverse (series like Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl) and the diminishing DC Extended Universe (with two versions of the Justice League movie), to the separate universe of The Batman spearheaded by Matt Reeves and Safran and Gunn’s own The Suicide Squad (a quasi-reboot/do-over of 2016’s Suicide Squad).
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“No one was minding the mint,” Gunn said at the time. “They were just giving away IP like they were party favors to any creators who smiled at them. What we are going to do is promise that everything from our first project going forward is going to be unified.”
In consolidating DC into one unified, interconnected DC Universe — except for Reeves’ Batman Epic Crime Saga, which exists separately but is under the DC Studios banner — Gunn and Safran are asserting quality control over the DC brand in the film and television projects that are being produced by DC Studios.
“It is going to be mostly DCU, and then occasionally there’s some Elseworlds tales. There are things that naturally lend themselves to Elseworlds tales. We have a lot of animated projects and they are sort of a different beast; they aren’t all like Creature Commandos,” Gunn told Entertainment Weekly when asked about telling stories both inside and out of the DCU.
The adult animated series Creature Commandos is canon and takes place in the same shared continuity as Superman and the upcoming Peacemaker season 2, for example. Other animated projects, like the previously announced “younger-skewing” shows My Adventures with Green Lantern, Starfire!, and Super Powers, are DC Studios productions but are “Elseworlds,” meaning they don’t take place within the DCU canon.
Gunn added DC Studios is giving “people a lot of freedom to tell different stories,” saying, “There’s definitely room for people to tell other stories… And when it’s somebody who’s important, like Matt Reeves — who I’ve had an admiration for a long time as one of the very, very few filmmakers who is out there making spectacle, commercial fair, that is also an artist — then you have to stand up and listen.”
But as a “script-first” company, Gunn noted, “The script still needs to be good. We’re not going to make it unless we like the script.” (Gunn recently revealed DC Studios “killed” a greenlit project because the script wasn’t where it needed to be.) While Gunn-produced projects like The Batman 2 and the prospective Constantine sequel being developed by Keanu Reeves exist under the Elseworlds branding, they will adhere to the same edict as any other DC Studios production.
“If it’s an Elseworlds tale, then it’s worth telling something that might tend to confuse a few people. But also part of our thing is really being clear about what is Elseworlds and what is DCU,” Gunn said. “And the other thing is not just giving away properties like they’re party favors to people doing low-budget TV shows or stuff that we have no quality control over because we’re making a few thousand dollars on the rights. It is having some sense of quality control over everything.”
Now that DC movies and TV shows are under DC Studios, Gunn and Safran are like the dynamic duo of Batman and Robin, bringing order to what Safran described in 2023 as “a brand that was somewhat in chaos.”
