DC Studios' James Gunn Drops Surprising Martian Manhunter Tease

Gunn reveals the first look at the DCU's Chocos.

By Jenna Anderson

The live-action DC Universe is headed to a new uncharted territory, thanks to James Gunn and Peter Safran's upcoming slate of movies and television shows. A number of these projects are already in various stages of becoming a reality, from Creature Commandos arriving on Max later this year, to Gunn's Superman movie having just wrapped filming, to the sophomore season of Peacemaker being currently in the middle of production. Thanks to the latest social media post from Gunn, we now know one bit of world-building that will be a part of that new era. On Friday, Gunn took to Threads to respond to a fan's thread about comic-accurate moments they would like to see recreated in the DCU, which includes J'onn J'onnz / Martian Manhunter's obsession with the fictional cookies Chocos. He attached a picture of a physical package of Chocos cookies, seeming to insinuate that the cookies will play a role in some live-action DC project, outside of a billboard being spotted in set photos for Superman. He subsequently shared the Chocos packaging on his Instagram and Twitter.

"Gosh @dcofficial is full of such fun lore," Gunn's post on Threads reads. "Can't wait to see some of these moments (and the thousands of more like them) on the big and small screen. Thanks for the fun thread, @captain_mohando."

What Are Chocos?

Chocos are the DC Universe's stand-in for Oreo cookies, which were originally introduced during Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire's Justice League International run. A recurring gag in the run's early issues established that Billy Batson / Captain Marvel ate Oreos and drank milk during team meetings — a habit that Martian Manhunter quickly adopted as well. This habit quickly became something of an obsession, with J'onn frequently stress eating the cookies in various appearances. By 2000, John Ostrander, Doug Mahnke and Patrick Gleason's Martian Manhunter series renamed the Oreos to Chocos, in order to avoid any copyright issues with Oreo's parent company, Nabisco. Martian Manhunter #24 took J'onn's penchant for Chocos even further, establishing that his Martian physiology is negatively effected when he suffers withdrawls from the cookies.

It is unclear at this point where Gunn's physical prop of a Chocos package could factor into the DCU, especially since the character of Martian Manhunter has not been publicly cast in the franchise. It's not impossible to imagine a character in Superman or Peacemaker Season 2 eating the cookies, as a clever way to establish the various pieces of in-universe ephemera for the new DCU before Martian Manhunter appears onscreen.

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What Is on the DC Universe Slate?

As Gunn and Safran revealed back in January of 2023, the initial DC Studios slate will include 2025's Superman, 2026's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and currently-undated movies The Brave and the Bold, Swamp Thing, and The Authority. It will also include the HBO Max television shows Waller, Booster Gold, Lanterns, Paradise Lost, and an animated Creature Commandos series. Reports have indicated that a live-action Teen Titans movie and an animated Jurassic League movie are in the works at DC Studios, although neither have been publicly confirmed.

"A lot of people think it's going to be Marvel 2.0, and definitely I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences," Gunn explained in 2023. "We are telling a big, huge, central story that is like Marvel, except for, I think that we're a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we've gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we're also creating a universe that is like Star Wars, where there's different times, different places, different things, or Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex." 

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