Superhero War: Brawls at DC Give Marvel the Edge

There are few rivalries like the one that has faced Marvel and DC for almost 90 years. First in the world of comics, and decades later in film and television. As if they were the Pepsi and Coca-Cola of superheroes, the one who blinked first, lost. and while Marvel Studios has been advancing for years with a clear plan for film releases and series in streaming under the protective umbrella of its parent company, Disney, in DC Studios there is no roadmap due to the changes in the shareholding of Warner, its parent company, and its own lack of definition between directors entering and leaving, confrontations between filmmakers, premieres on-line advanced or delayed without criteria and numerous actors wanting (or not) to be Batman and Superman.

In Marvel there are also layoffs, but in DC every movie is a brawl. One after another, the different executives of this production company have been crashing in their plans to redirect the ship, until on November 22 Warner announced that James Gunn, a director with vision who has worked in the two rival companies, would lead the helm. DC Creative. However, Gunn, who has confirmed that he has a plan for the next 8-10 years, has neither started on the right foot nor is he going to enjoy an easy journey. “We know that we are not going to make everyone happy along the way,” he said prophetically, at the beginning of December on Twitter.

DC started its publications in 1934 as National Allied Publications, and three years later it was recast as National Allied Publications. DC (acronym for Detective Comics), while its rival, Timely Publications, was born in January 1939: It wasn’t Marvel until 1961. Its film studio arrived in 1993 and in 2009 Disney bought it for about 4,000 million dollars. minutia, seeing the economic performance of a year like 2022, with little success and risk with three premieres like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness Y Thor: Love and Thunder, that with everything, they have exceeded 2,500 million dollars at the worldwide box office. And DC Studios? Almost 1,700 million, and that they bet big with The Batman, which now stars Robert Pattinson, Y Black Adam, with Dwayne Johnson, to which they added the animated children’s film DC Super Pet League. At DC Studios they missed a vision like the one defended on the other side by Kevin Feige and his two right hands, victoria alonso and Louis D’Esposito. Since 2008, Marvel Studios has released around thirty films, which can be seen independently or interrelated, thus building customer loyalty.

The announcement of the arrival of James Gunn, with producer Peter Safran at his side for the commercial part, drew initial applause from the industry: the filmmaker, who was born 56 years ago in St. Louis, a childhood fan of zombie movies, He has always been climbing positions with an estimable artistic pulse and, of course, very particular. He started at the mythical production company Troma, a cheap horror and fantastic film company; later he wrote the scripts for Scooby Doo Y Dawn of the Dead and, after a faltering start as a director, in 2014 he made a splash with Guardians of the Galaxy, a film from which not much was expected and which, thanks to its pop commitment to a nostalgic soundtrack and humor in the script, was a box office and critical success. Four years later, after the premiere of his sequel, Gunn fell out of favor when, signed the contract for the third part, A conservative website recovered his tweets from 2008 joking about pedophilia and rape. Disney fired him in July, and in October of that 2018 Warner announced that, despite this past on social networks, Gunn would be the director of the new the suicide squad (released in summer 2021) and the person in charge of the series The peacemaker. In March 2019, Disney backed down and put him back in command of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which will hit theaters, delayed by the pandemic, next May.

putting out fires

Since the beginning of December, Gunn has been putting out fires and starting others, always through social networks, a channel through which he continues to communicate despite that slip in 2008. Of course, now his tweets are automatically deleted after a few months. And that has caused her to hook up with the actor Ray Fisher (Cyborg in The Justice League), who in turn had clashed with Warner previously. The interpreter accused Gunn in mid-December of “false kindness” for deleting tweets in which the filmmaker expressed his solidarity with the actor after Fisher attacked director Joss Whedon. for his tyrannical behavior on set. “Refusing to apologize for your toxic behavior seems like a requirement for a job at Warner-DC,” Fisher closed. To which Gunn replied: “All my tweets are automatically deleted after a few months, Ray.”

Harder was the attack of the fans of Wonder Woman and its protagonist, Gal Gadot, when Gunn said that in a first stage of DC Studios a third film was not contemplated, which had already entered pre-production ordered by the former executives in charge, with this character. He also responded to the barrage in a Twitter thread: “Our choices for the DC Universe are based on what we think is best for the story and for the characters of DC, who have been around for almost 85 years now. Maybe they are good decisions, maybe not, but we make them with a sincere heart and with integrity, and always thinking about history. And he continued: “When we accepted the job, we knew that there was going to be a period of turbulence”, because they had to make “difficult and hardly explainable decisions” to organize the study. “This means very little to us compared to our jobs as artists and guardians, responsible for creating a vast and wonderful future for DC.”

For this reason, a third confrontation, this time with Dwayne Johnson, has ended with a virtual handshake. Black Adam it has not been good business; Despite this, Johnson, who had been with the film for 15 years, wanted to make a sequel. For this he made up the accounts, fattening the benefits, and passed them to the digital medium Deadline as soon as he heard that they would not shoot the sequel. Caught in the resignation, on December 20 Johnson got out of the way and announced that he had connected with Gunn and that they would see how his character would fit into the DC universe. Worse has happened to Henry Cavill, who reappeared as Superman in a final sequence of Black Adam, with the intention that no one would forget about him. The key: Johnson and Cavill share an agent, Dany Garcia, Johnson’s ex-wife who leads his holding company of companies. Gunn didn’t have Cavill as Superman in mind, or even an adult Superman. As much as Cavill encouraged his fans in networks, the man of steel will return only in a more youthful version, according to the new managers of the production company.

Batman’s future will also be decided shortly. Matt Reeves, Director of batman, will meet with Gunn and Safran in the coming weeks to discuss planning for the Batman universe. “They have behaved very well” said the filmmaker this weekend to Collider. “They want to talk to me about the general plan and then they want to hear the plan for the batverse”. Among those plans is a series for HBO Max about the Penguin with Colin Farrell reprising the role. Since they are already working on the script for the sequel, there will be Pattinson for a while.

Later this month, Gunn says he will go public with his plans for the next three years. Although this 2023 has to defend films already finished by the previous creative team: Shazam! fury of the gods (March 17), Flash (June 16; a film that has accumulated delays, scandals involving its protagonist, Ezra Miller, and in which script rewrites have erased the Cyborg character, due to Fisher’s attacks on DC), Blue Beetle (August 18) and aquaman and the lost kingdom (December 25th). And meanwhile, Gunn what does he do? In a January 6 tweet, he recounted that he had written a third of a new (as yet unannounced) DC TV series, given the go-ahead for the digital effects of the latest. Guardians of the Galaxy (and passed notes to the editor) and participated in two big meetings for DC Studios. And that, in one day. What will not have planned in a month and a half.