Warner Brothers fires James Gunn and Peter Safran as producers for their DC adaptations

Variety announced at least 2 prominent filmmakers have been fired from their positions as the overseers of the DC comics adaptatations:

In a surprise executive shuffle, James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as CEOs and chairmen of DC Studios. They will be replaced by Jeremy Latcham, who will serve as president and chief creative officer.

Gunn and Safran’s exit is unexpected because they were named as part of David Ellison’s business leadership team at the newly renamed Skydance when Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery had closed in October. After four years as heads of DC, resetting the studio’s comic book division to mixed commercial results, Gunn and Safran will return full time to creative work.

Gunn and Safran were appointed in 2022 by former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, with an edict to fashion a true rival to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. Under their direction, the duo rebooted the languishing DC Universe with last summer’s “Superman,” a relative success with $618 million globally, and then stumbled with July’s “Supergirl,” a massive bomb with $126 million on a $170 million budget. “Clayface,” a darker, R-rated body-horror thriller, performed modestly this fall with $109 million on a $44 million budget. Meanwhile, they expanded the comic book empire to streaming with its “Peacemaker” and “Lanterns” shows for HBO Max.

I hope Clayface lost money, though you probably couldn't expect such a sorry trade journal to seriously admit it. But if Clayface was a success, that's awful, because it only ensures continuation of a genre that's taken up too much of the market, and at the expense of the comedy genre. And it gives a very bad feeling about what kind of audience we have attending such fare today.

But this certainly is impressive that, under Skydance ownership, Gunn and Safran have been given the dismissal notice they decidedly deserve. It's not like Gunn's Superman film has actually left something that people are talking about it all the time over a year after it first premiered. Let's also consider Gunn was originally fired from Marvel/Disney employ after it was discovered he'd written obscene jokes about sexual abuse on social media. That kind of repellence doesn't help matters. Also, the Lanterns TV show builds on leftist ideology, with the worst part being how a policewoman was scapegoated for Hal Jordan's demise in a live action program.

I guess now, it's a question of whether comics movies will start to gradually fade away? They fail to acknowledge the Marvel movieverse, as I call it, began to stumble at the end of the past decade when the Capt. Marvel movie premiered, and it's been mostly failures since, including the 4th Thor film. Perhaps if the movies and TV shows evaporated, we'd finally be able to get some focus on improving the artistic and financial fortunes of mainstream comicdom? We could only hope.