DC Studios just greenlit a television series built around a hero most casual audiences couldn’t name a week ago, and it did so right after one of its highest-profile bets of the year came up short. That timing says a lot about where James Gunn actually wants to take this universe.
The Bet: Mister Terrific
A Mister Terrific series is now in active development at DC Studios, with Edi Gathegi returning as Michael Holt and Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg attached to write the pilot. Gathegi’s version of the character, introduced in 2025’s Superman, was one of the most praised elements of that film, and he’s already locked into a multi-project deal that also includes reprising the role in the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow.
What makes this notable isn’t the character himself so much as the timing. The news broke in the same wave of coverage as the fallout from Supergirl, which opened to roughly $63 million worldwide against a $186 million budget and is now projected to lose well over $100 million for Warner Bros. That’s the kind of number that usually scares a studio into retreating toward its safest, most recognizable names. Instead, DC Studios is doing the opposite: doubling down on a character with fourteen fictional PhDs and essentially zero mainstream name recognition.
A Pattern, Not a One-Off
Mister Terrific isn’t the only unfamiliar name on DC’s slate right now. Clayface, an R-rated film built around a C-list Batman villain, arrives in theaters this October. Lanterns, an HBO series centered on Hal Jordan and John Stewart, premieres in August. And Jason Momoa’s take on Lobo, the cigar-chomping bounty hunter who stole scenes in Supergirl, has generated real momentum toward a solo movie, even though nothing has been greenlit yet. Momoa has been public about the one condition he’d require to do it: an R rating, no compromises, because a sanitized PG-13 Lobo defeats the entire point of the character.
None of this is new behavior for James Gunn. It’s the same instinct that produced Peacemaker and Creature Commandos, two projects built on genuinely obscure IP that turned into some of the best-reviewed live-action and animated releases DC has put out in years. Creature Commandos opened the rebooted continuity to a 95% critics’ score, and Peacemaker season two held up in the low 90s despite a divisive finale. Neither leaned on a household name to get there.
The Actual Argument
The case for this strategy isn’t that every lesser-known character will be a hit. It’s that a shared universe needs texture beyond its three or four biggest names if it wants to support something like a Justice League movie or a Darkseid-scale event down the road. Rushing straight to the trinity every time a smaller project stumbles just recreates the same over-inflated tentpole risk that got Supergirl into trouble in the first place: a $186 million budget for a character with a much smaller built-in audience than a Batman or Superman. A Mister Terrific TV series, by contrast, is comparatively cheap to produce, gives a proven actor room to build the character in long form, and doesn’t need to open to blockbuster numbers to be worth making.
There’s also a simple creative upside to using characters audiences don’t already have baggage with. Nobody walks into a Mister Terrific story with fifty years of prior adaptations to compare it against. That’s real narrative freedom, and it’s the same freedom that let Peacemaker get as strange and specific as it did.
The Risk Underneath It
The counterargument is straightforward: goodwill and critical acclaim don’t automatically translate into box office success, and DC has now tested that gap twice with mixed results. Supergirl‘s box office collapse has intensified scrutiny on Gunn and co-CEO Peter Safran, whose contracts run out in late 2026 or 2027, right as Paramount works to close its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. A change in ownership at the top is exactly the kind of event that tends to reward whoever delivers a quick, safe win over whoever is three years into patient world-building. If Clayface or the Mister Terrific series stumble the way Supergirl did, the pressure to abandon the slow-build approach in favor of another Batman or Wonder Woman movie will only get louder.
For now, though, the studio is still spending its capital on Michael Holt instead of retreating to safer ground, and that’s a real signal about what kind of universe Gunn is trying to build. Whether it’s the right call depends entirely on how patient Warner Bros., and soon Paramount, are willing to be.
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