The Four Color Media Monitor

According to what's told by Interview Magazine, which spoke with Gunn about his visions for how the DCU in movies will be handled going forward. And at the beginning, they write apologia for Gunn's leftist visions in Superman:

In the weeks following Superman‘s theatrical release, the anti-woke crowd seized on the film for being too political. But if politics are personal, that is James Gunn’s superpower: he imbues his characters—villains, heroes, and everything in between—with a palpable sense of humanity. The second season of Peacemaker, Gunn’s DC Comics spin-off, is no exception. John Cena leads the cast as Christopher Smith, the titular peacemaker who’ll kill anyone who obstructs the path to global harmony. At the end of last season, he began to grapple with the hypocrisy of it all—that his life is at odds with his moral convictions. Gunn, the writer and director, calls the show “a spiritual successor to Super,” the 2010 dark superhero satire in which he directed Rainn Wilson. [...]

I'm not surprised at all they'd concoct such a pathetic defense for the divisive politics Gunn put into his movie. Does "personal agenda" make it okay? Of course not. All they're doing is confirming a big problem with the film - the scriptwriter hijacked it as a platform for his personal politics. And when said politics are as divisive as already indicated, it's just insufferable. And what "humanity" is there as a result? I don't find the premise of Peacemaker appealing either. Now for how they describe the new take on the DCU:

WILSON: What’s it like being a part of this world-building? I imagine that must’ve been one of the most exciting things.

GUNN: I think it’s the reason I agreed to the job. You talk about George R.R. Martin, and he is really one of the guys who I love and look up to. I’m an enormous fan of his and people say, “Oh, the DCU is doing what MCU is.” But I think it really is a lot more to me what the Game of Thrones world is like or what Star Wars is like, because we’re building a universe and then picking out little pieces of it and telling individual stories from that universe.

Comparing it to a TV show and franchise which was built on jarring violence - to the point where even some leftist news outlets seemingly couldn't bear it - is grotesque in the extreme. Game of Thrones isn't the kind of series or novels I embrace, and Martin himself hardly appeals to me as a novelist. One more thing I may as well comment on here is what Gunn says about how he wrote Lex Luthor:

WILSON: What differentiates the DC universe from those other universes that you mentioned?

GUNN: There is not a New York City in our DCU. There is not a Los Angeles in our DCU. There is Metropolis, Evergreen, and Coast City. It’s a different map. It’s a world in which some form of superheroes, which we call Metahumans, have existed for at least 300 years and they’ve been a part of our life. But I think that we’re reaching a point in the DCU where there’s three factions. There’s the Metahumans, the governments, and then the corporations. And the corporations are equally important. There’s Luthor Corp, there’s Lord Tech and Stagg Industries and Wayne Enterprises, which are the four big companies that are vying for another type of domination.

WILSON: Yeah.

GUNN: And they aren’t evil corporations, really. They’re just fucking amoral corporations.

WILSON: Wait, you’re saying that Luthor Corp is not an evil corporation?

GUNN: The corporations in themselves aren’t evil. Corporations are amoral. I guess governments are amoral too. But it’s really more dependent on the morality of the figurehead. In this case, Lex Luthor’s a pretty bad guy, although his corporation has done some great things. Luthor has created a battery, which has made the running of the world a much more efficient process. He has cars that run more efficiently, that are better for clean air. He’s done some really great things for the world, which is the reason for his obsession with Superman. He was considered the greatest guy in the world a few years ago, even though there were Metahumans, and then this guy with dimples and a glint in his eye in a silly costume came in and made him feel like shit, so he’s been sort of obsessed with him ever since and has gone evil. I don’t think Lord Tech is the same. It’s run by Maxwell Lord, who we meet in the first episode of Peacemaker. He’s not the greatest guy in the world, but as far as billionaires go, he’s probably more on the right side of things than Lex Luthor.

What, is Gunn depicting Luthor as a metaphor for Henry Ford, who was a very bad man in his time? Well sorry, but the negative metaphors for Israel/USA and even Trump ruin everything. I'll admit, if Gunn is depicting Max Lord more positively than was seen in the past 2 decades, that's flattering on its own, but it still doesn't compensate for the continued exploitation of these creations to serve the screenwriters' own personal politics. And again, comparing it to Game of Thrones only makes it more discouraging. Besides, today's corporations - certainly in the past decade - were going out of their way to force leftist agendas upon their customers. To say they're amoral isn't enough of a critique. And come to think of it, portraying Luthor as jealous that a guy in costume somehow, according to the film's logic, literally stole the show from the bald crook, wouldn't have worked well in the comics either. What I do know is that by the 1950s, the motivations given to Luthor were that he despised Superboy for supposedly leading to a situation where his hair was damaged by an accident during a scientific experiment, rendering him bald; even that's more of a premise than what we're presented with here. In real life, do celebrity actors literally take all the admiration away from somebody who's not even in the same line of work? Of course not. I'm all for surreal storytelling, but even this is awfully hard to swallow.

When Collider followed up on this, they noted:

...The difference is structural. While Marvel thrives on clashes between heroes and villains, Gunn’s DCU is setting the stage for a world defined by three competing forces: metahumans, governments, and corporations.

Umm, even Marvel's comics in the past could emphasize clashes with crooked corporations like Roxxon, so it's silly to make it sound like even movies couldn't do that. Come to think of it, if Gunn's implying there's no serious clashes between heroes and villains in his take on the DCU, that could be problematic too, as the following also suggests:

...Instead of focusing narrowly on morality plays between good and evil, Gunn is mapping a broader struggle that feels systemic and political as much as it feels mythic. It’s a move that could finally differentiate DC’s cinematic universe from Marvel’s and cement its own identity as something closer to an epic political fantasy.

But again, surely that couldn't end up watering down the expected impact of whatever further films are in development? If this is how they intend to portray each and every film going forward, and not put much emphasis on battling villains, super or otherwise, then they're not doing much to excite the filmgoers who expect a certain degree of action. Let's also consider the politics they have in mind are bound to be far too liberal. And then, Collider's writer says:

This version of Luthor mirrors the anxieties surrounding real-world billionaires. Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are celebrated for innovation while simultaneously distrusted for their unchecked influence. Gunn seems intent on leaning into that ambiguity, framing Luthor not as a stock villain but as a cautionary tale of how ego and power corrupt even the most celebrated innovators.

If the Superman movie makes Luthor into a metaphor for Musk, that's all you need to know it's little more than a leftist screed. Sure, it's amazing they're willing to cite liberal figures like Bezos and Gates for their followup report, much like a college paper I'd looked at earlier did, but that's probably meant to serve as a clever cover for what they really think of figures like Donald Trump, who was a big business mogul years before. And if the Superman film comes within even miles of serving as an anti-Trump metaphor, what does that say?

There may have once been a time when a lot of leftists were willing to be critical of corporatism, but today's that changed considerably, and we can't think the directions taken with these films signal they're willing to take an objective approach again. Why else would Gunn say they're merely "amoral"? Also, he's working for one, isn't he?

And again, comparing it to something as repulsive as Game of Thrones is very unimpressive. It's quite possible to find and highlight examples of power play tales without having to bring up graphic horror stories as a way to make the point. Using Martin's gross novels and TV show as an example for comparisons is not a good way to convey what the new DC movieverse is all about. So again, they've only succeeded in making me feel all the more discouraged from wasting time on what they have in store.

Labels: dc comics, golden calf of death, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, Superman, violence