James Gunn Offers Update on DC’s The Authority Movie

Now that James Gunn is co-chair and co-CEO of DC Studios, he has been sharing details about the company’s upcoming projects online. The rebooted franchise’s first big film, Superman: Legacy, is heading to theaters next year and it’s being helmed by Gunn. There are a lot of other films on the horizon, but some are further along than others. Last year, it was announced that a The Authority movie was in the works, and Gunn teased that it was a “passion project.” There haven’t been many updates about the movie yet, but María Gabriela de Faría is playing The Authority member Angela Spica/The Engineer in Superman: Legacy, which is a promising start. Gunn recently explained why no casting announcements for The Authority movie have been shared.

“When are u gonna cast the rest of the Authority members????” one fan asked Gunn on Threads. “We won’t green light a film until we have a finished script we’re happy with and, in general, we won’t cast a film until the script is finished. This is why some projects are moving faster than anticipated and others more slowly. It’s always gonna be quality first no matter what,” Gunn explained.  

What Is DC’s The Authority? 

The Authority was a superhero team spun out of another comic book series, Stormwatch, which was part of the independent comic imprint WildStorm before it was absorbed by DC. Writer Warren Ellis took over the series in Vol. 2, transforming Wildstorm Universe lore significantly. While writing the WildC.A.T.S./Alien crossover event comic in 1998, Ellis killed off a bunch of the Stormwatch characters he didn’t personally create or want to use, taking the surviving characters (Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo and his husband Midnighter, etc.) into a new series, The Authority, in 1999. The Authority’s main selling point was being a team that operated unilaterally, independent of politics, law, or ethics, doing whatever was necessary to complete their missions and/or goals. 

“Yeah, this is a big movie and I don’t know how many of you know are familiar with The Authority,” Gunn previously explained. “The Authority is a very different kind of superhero story. They are basically good intention, but they think that the world is completely broken and the only way to fix it is to take things into their own hands, whether that means killing people, destroying heads of state, changing governments, whatever they want to do to make the world better. And we’ll see how that journey goes for them. But as I said earlier, there’s morally gray characters of which these are.”

Stay tuned for more updates about DC Studios’ upcoming projects.