James Gunn and Peter Safran are done running DC Studios. Skydance announced on November 9 that the pair will step down as co-chief executives on December 1, and former Marvel Studios executive Jeremy Latcham will take over as president and chief creative officer, overseeing DC’s film, television and animation slate.
Frank and Squeaks recorded the latest episode of Geek Freaks minutes after the news broke, and Frank had no patience for the official wording. Skydance hasn’t called it a firing or offered a reason for the change. Frank called it one anyway: “James Gunn and Peter Safran just got fired. I’m using the term fired because there’s no way it wasn’t fired.”
A Reversal in a Matter of Weeks
The timing is what bothers him most. In October, Deadline reported that David Ellison had met with Gunn and Safran and planned to keep them in charge after Skydance closed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. A few weeks later, they’re out. Frank reads that as a new owner arriving with a different picture of what DC should be, and he thinks cutting the cord this early in the first chapter of the DCU is a bad call.
Squeaks took it harder. From where he sits, the plan was working. Superman landed, Lanterns gave HBO a finale people argued about for weeks, and the slate was finally starting to connect. What he wanted was the long build Marvel spent a decade on before Infinity War and Endgame. “We got to build something to get to that Infinity War, Endgame. Like, come on, man,” he said. Now he isn’t sure anyone will finish it.
Who Jeremy Latcham Is
Latcham is no stranger to Gunn. He was part of the early Marvel Studios team under Kevin Feige, worked on Iron Man, The Avengers and the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, and served as an executive producer on Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Gunn and Safran pointed to that shared history in their own statement. After Marvel, Latcham started his own production company.
Gunn isn’t walking away from DC entirely. He is still finishing Man of Tomorrow, the Superman sequel due in July 2027 with Safran producing, and he has said he is writing another DC project. Everything past that is up in the air, and Frank and Squeaks went down the list. The Batman’s place in the new DCU is still unsettled. Dynamic Duo, with its unusual animation style, is exactly the kind of swing a new regime might rethink.
Frank Goes Looking for a Silver Lining
Frank’s prediction is that DC under Skydance makes safer, cheaper movies, and makes them faster. That sounds like a downgrade, but he sees a couple of things fans might like. Lanterns killed off Hal Jordan, and Frank doesn’t expect a studio watching its returns to keep a Green Lantern that recognizable off the board for long. “Killing off Hal Jordan in the show was very risky. And that’s not what you do to make money,” he said. He also thinks a Flash movie arrives sooner than it would have on Gunn’s timeline.
He spent the rest of the Headlines segment hunting for good news in Skydance’s mandate of 30 theatrical films a year. Francis Galluppi is making a new Constantine movie. Danny McBride is directing Bradley Cooper as Duke in G.I. Joe, which Frank expects to be a solid mid-budget action movie in the vein of The A-Team, worth a matinee and not much riskier than that. Netflix is taking Stranger Things back to 1955 Nevada with the prequel Other Worlds. A studio that needs that many movies every year has room for the smaller, darker comic book projects Frank has been asking for since Clayface, and he would rather bet on that than on nothing.
Squeaks is holding onto a different hope. He wants Latcham to keep Gunn’s plan and only adjust around the edges. Latcham’s first round of announcements after December 1 will show which of them called it.
Sources: GeekFreaksPodcast.com, TheWrap, Variety, Syfy, Fast Company
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