Cue lights, fade in on Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con 2024. Robert Downey Jr. slips off the Doctor Doom mask, and the walls reverberate with a thousand and one happy screams from the Marvel fandom. This was, is, and will remain the golden goose of realized MCU rumors, but it also underlined just how much glucose this franchise is running on.
Fast forward to now, where we’re in the wake of the franchise’s latest faceplant in Captain America: Brave New World — James Gunn‘s.
Per DC Studios ended up turning into a machine that turns out products for the sake of brand consumption rather than a truly creative superhero storytelling hub. His answer was as inspiring as they come.
I’d quit. I’m being serious! I’m not going to do this unless I think we’re doing good stuff that’s cool, that works.
Gunn’s DC Studios co-chair Peter Safran chimed in similarly, noting that they’re “not looking to make five movies a year and five series. We’re really focused on telling great versions of the stories we want to tell, and we have zero pressure on us from [WBD CEO] David [Zaslav] or anyone else to deliver more than that.”
Elsewhere, in January 2023. That film will begin shooting this summer, while others from that announcement have yet to lock down their scripts. Under Gunn’s hand, the stories are the golden geese.
Compare that to how the MCU has been walking the walk as of late. It famously undergoes extensive reshoots on many projects to keep the overarching events flexible at the cost of storytelling coherence and quality (as seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Secret Invasion, The Marvels, and now Brave New World), with some of these reshoots even occurring after poor test screenings because Marvel is too yellow to stand on business.
That’s because Marvel has no business to stand on — it exists solely to please the widest possible audience. Its is a product that relies on sugary fan service moves like a Downey Jr. Doctor Doom reveal to stay relevant, all while their actual filmmaking and storytelling approaches continue to be a laughingstock of the entertainment world.
Meanwhile, Gunn is committing to the exact opposite of that with his entire chest, having now gone as far as to say that he’ll quit if the DC Universe ever strays from its storytelling mandate. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a far better development than any A-list casting, post-credits scene, or Infinity Saga callback could ever hope to be.
Published: Feb 25, 2025 01:54 pm