James Gunn Won't Oversee Joker 2, Possibly The Batman 2 for DC Studios
The future of the live-action DC world has been in a unique state of flux over the past few years, with a wide variety of projects being brought to life. Amid the recent merger of Warner Bros. Discovery, there's been the question of how DC's movies and television shows will be restructured going forward. We got our answer on Tuesday in the form of a report from The Hollywood Reporter, which revealed that The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker writer-director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran will be serving as co-chairs of the newly-rebranded DC Studios.
The reporting sheds a bit more light on which projects Gunn and Safran will oversee — and which projects they might not. According to the update, Todd Phillips' standalone sequel Joker: Folie a Deux will not deal with Gunn and Safran, with Phillips instead reporting to Warner Bros. Pictures chairs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca. The report also teases that Matt Reeves' reported sequels and spinoffs to The Batman might not all under Gunn and Safran.
What will DC's future movies and shows be?
Under Warner Bros. Discovery, the DC world has been thrown into the headlines multiple times over, particularly after the cancellation of the long-awaited Batgirl movie. The newly-minted DC Studios still has a number of major high-profile projects in the years to come, including a second season of Peacemaker, and the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Blue Beetle.
"Our ambition is to bring Warners back and to produce great high quality films, and as we look at the opportunities that we have broadly, DC is one of the top of the list for us," Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav explained during an investor call earlier this year. "You look at Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman — these are brands that are known everywhere in the world. The ability to drive those all over the world with great story is a big opportunity for us. We have done a reset. We've restructured the business. We're going to focus."
"There will be a team with a 10-year plan focusing just on DC. It's very similar to the structure that Alan Horn and and Bob Iger put together, very effectively, with Kevin Feige at Disney. We think that we could build a long-term much stronger, sustainable growth business out of DC," he added. "And as part of that, we're going to focus on quality. We're not going to release any film before it's ready. We're not going to release a film to make quarter. The focus is going to be — how do we make each of these films, in general, as good as possible? DC is something that we think we could make better, and we're focused on it now. We have some great DC films coming up — Black Adam, Shazam!, and The Flash. We're working on all of those. we're very excited about them."