Justice League in 2017.
Following Joss Whedon replaced Zack Snyder on Justice League. Fortunately, James Gunn could be the key to Warner Bros. Discovery finally delivering on the DCEU's original promise.
The DCEU Was Supposed to Be Director Driven
While the jokes about the DCEU being dark weren't entirely inaccurate, there was far more variety to the first handful of DCEU movies than many people give them credit for. Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman and David Ayer's Suicide Squad were significantly different from one another, and even Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, despite the obvious similarities, have different tones, genre influences, and color palettes. Aquaman, which was also developed in this era, was obviously even more different than anything else in the franchise when it came out.
The approach was a sort of counter-programming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which was developing a reputation for having a "house style," with many complaints saying the movies were too similar to one another. In addition to being different from the MCU, the DCEU was going to be different from itself. While the movies maintained a particular continuity in character and story arcs, the movies were all meant to reflect the unique tendencies of their directors. While elements of that strategy are still true today, the DCEU failed to live up to its original promise.
Why the DCEU Failed its Original Plan
Despite the initial claims that the DCEU would be "director-driven," a rocky start to the franchise thanks to low rotten tomatoes scores and below-expectations at the box office (even though all the films still qualified as box office hits), Warner Bros. executives panicked and started interfering with the movies, ordering massive rewrites and reshoots for both Suicide Squad and Justice League, pushing Snyder out of the franchise entirely. While the DCEU has still continues to hire directors who put their own imprint on the movies, the movies all ultimately fit in a far narrower spectrum of tone and content targeted at more mainstream audiences.
Warner Bros. kept losing faith in its directors, and even after the failure of Justice League, studio executives kept interfering with the movies, notably calling for rewrites and reshoots on Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. James Gunn was famously given complete freedom with The Suicide Squad, but the DCEU's history of trampling its directors is still a looming shadow.
Despite launching the universe and playing an influential role in mapping out the DCEU plan and producing other DC movies, Snyder wanted to focus on directing and was never in an official studio role equivalent to Kevin Feige's Marvel Studios role. So, while he had broad creative leeway in the early days of the DCEU, he had far less leverage to push back against the eventual demands to change Justice League.
How James Gunn's New Role Will Fulfill The Original DCEU Vision
One of the most surprising parts of Gunn being hired as one of the co-chairs of DC Studios is the fact that the studio hired an actual filmmaker to fill a role normally occupied by executives who aren't as experienced in writing or directing. One of the most notorious problems in all of Hollywood has always been the conflict between creatives and executives, and executives usually have all the power. While the other DC Studios co-CEO, Peter Safran, will manage the business side of the operation, Gunn is in charge of the DCEU's creative development. Having a filmmaker in that role, especially a filmmaker as willing to push boundaries like James Gunn, DCEU directors are going to have a much stronger advocate in their corner than in the past.
While Gunn himself is known for a fairly specific style, anyone familiar with his pre-Marvel work knows he's far more stylistically diverse than just Brightburn. Putting a filmmaker like Gunn as the co-lead of a studio is a bold statement by Warner Bros., because you don't put a filmmaker like James Gunn in a studio executive role unless you want an executive with the cinematic sensibilities of James Gunn.
Peacemaker. If David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery wanted a studio executive to oversee a conventional blockbuster franchise of DC characters, they wouldn't have made James Gunn responsible for developing it, or given him the authority to insulate directors from other studio executives.
The historical mismanagement of the DCEU by Warner Bros. executives can make it hard to think that yet another executive shuffle will finally solve a decades-long problem, but the major wildcard that comes with putting James Gunn in charge of DC Studios means they're finally learning from past mistakes. At a time when the DCEU is finally healing after all the damage caused by Joss Whedon's Justice League in 2017, James Gunn is exactly what the DCEU needs to fulfill that original director-driven vision.
