Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has been hired to lead DC Studios into the future as the mastermind of the rebooted DC Universe, and he already has one big advantage over Marvel Studios’ head honcho Kevin Feige. Whereas Feige is a producer whose priorities lie in economic considerations like marketability and four-quadrant appeal, Gunn is a director whose priorities lie solely in character and storytelling. The rushed production schedules that lead to movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the on-set rewrites that lead to movies like Thor: Love and Thunder won’t beset the movies of the DCU, because Gunn is rectifying the mistakes that Marvel has made.
James Gunn Has The Eye Of A Director
Unlike Feige, who spearheads the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the eye of a producer and businessman, Gunn has the eye of a director. He’s focused on creativity, not profit margins. When a DC movie is coming together, Gunn can help to craft sequences from the perspective of a director rather than just a producer and a team of VFX artists. According to IndieWire, director Lucrecia Martel turned down Marvel’s offer to direct Black Widow when the studio told her, “Don’t worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.” Filmmakers prefer to be in charge of every aspect of their movies – especially such an integral aspect as the action scenes in a superhero movie. As a filmmaker himself, Gunn understands that as well as anyone. Usually, a producer’s job is to meld a director’s vision into something commercially viable (and less personal), whereas Gunn is committed to nurturing that vision.
DC Studios’ management has a great solution for the one-man band operation that has often caused problems at Marvel Studios. At Marvel, the creative and business sides of the process are both handled by the same person. At DC, Gunn can handle the creative side while his co-CEO Peter Safran handles the business side of things. Gunn has already promised that cameras won’t start rolling on a DC movie until the script is ready. Producers like Feige are only concerned with making a release date, which results in a messy, nightmarish production process where the third act is being rewritten and retooled during filming. Gunn has made it clear that he’ll save his directors the stress of a jumbled, aimless production and save his audience the disappointment of watching a movie that was rushed to completion, because no DCU entry will get a confirmed release date until the script is ready. For DC Studios, the audience comes first, not the shareholders.
DCU Movies Can Benefit From Creative Action Sequences
The films of the DCU will benefit from inspired, imaginative action sequences, because the corporate overlord that everyone is answering to is a creative himself, and he’s helmed plenty of great action scenes throughout his directorial career. The fact that Marvel Studios handles all the action set-pieces and gives its directors no control over them means that the action in the MCU movies all look the same. They have the same bland, CG-heavy aesthetic and the same balance of generic action beats and quippy mid-fight banter. The DCU’s upcoming movies will have more unique, idiosyncratic action scenes.
From the Guardians of the Galaxy’s escape from the Kyln to the opening bloodbath in The Suicide Squad, Gunn has proven that he has a penchant for inventive action sequences. But he won’t ask his filmmakers to recreate that style; they’ll have the freedom to come up with their own. The house style set by Zack Snyder for the original DC Extended Universe gave all the action sequences a dreary, washed-out color palette with overstylized visuals and an overuse of slow-motion. Instead of forcing directors like Patty Jenkins, James Wan, and David F. Sandberg to shoot Snyder-style action – or even Gunn-style action – Gunn will encourage them to forge their own style of cinematic action.
Will Every DCU Movie Feel Like A James Gunn Movie?
Much like Snyder, Gunn has a distinctive love-it-or-hate-it filmmaking style. Gunn’s style is defined by dark humor, snappy dialogue, graphic violence, and pop culture references. Some fans are worried that every single film in the DCU will exhibit that style, but Gunn has assured those dissenters that he won’t put his own artistic stamp on every installment in the franchise. Instead, he’ll hire directors with their own unique style and encourage them to imbue their movies with their own voice.
Gunn told DC.com, “Even though this is all a connected universe, it’s really important to me that the individual writers and directors on the projects give their own self-expression to it, just like they do in the comics.” Superman: Legacy will have Gunn’s unmistakable style, because Gunn himself is writing and directing the movie, but every other film will adhere to its own director’s sensibility. James Mangold’s Swamp Thing movie won’t be a Gunn-style Swamp Thing movie; it’ll be a Mangold-style Swamp Thing movie. Gunn explained, “Different artists bring remarkably different looks, feels, and tones. This is not the Gunn-verse.”