James Gunn Confirms the DCU Has a Shocking History Compared to Marvel

“Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet,” Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury tells Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in 2008’s Iron Man. The first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man introduced the superhero who started it all — even if the armored avenger wasn’t, to paraphrase Phil Coulson, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s first rodeo. The lead up to 2012’s The Avengers revealed that a green gamma monster, an Asgardian god, and a World War II super soldier all predated Stark’s superhero, while later films like 2015’s Ant-Man and 2019’s Captain Marvel confirmed that Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym and Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers were active decades before Stark said the words “I am Iron Man.”

While 2021’s Eternals spanned thousands of years and 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever revealed the Talokan mutant Namor to be hundreds of years old, Paul Bettany’s Vision argued in Captain America: Civil War that “the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially” in the time since Stark announced himself as Iron Man. No such point of demarcation exists in the new DC Universe that DC Studios CEOs and co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran are shaping into existence.

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Unlike the MCU, where the general population has been aware of superhumans like the original Steve Rogers Captain America since the 1940s, metahumans have been in the public consciousness for “300 years,” Gunn told Entertainment Weekly. “If you saw a shark-man walking down the street, you’d probably vomit and s— yourself to death. If they saw one, it would be more like if you saw Paul McCartney on the sidewalk in New York.”

“I grew up reading DC and Marvel comics and having worlds and universes of superheroes who were interacting. I grew up watching Super Friends on Saturday mornings,” Gunn explained. “It’s a long time coming, to be able to be a part of a world in which superheroes are real. We don’t have to explain everyone away. There’s a little bit of magic in this world. There’s science beyond our understanding in this world. This is the kind of place where there’s an island full of dinosaurs that probably exists.” 

The Superman director has already confirmed that the Man of Steel (David Corenswet) is well known to the people of Metropolis by the time we meet him in the movie (in theaters July 11), while the Gunn-penned Creature Commandos revealed that the public has at least some awareness of the “perhaps mythical, perhaps real, all-female island nation of Themyscira” that will be featured in the upcoming series Paradise Lost and, presumably, the just-announced Wonder Woman movie in the works at DC Studios.

Gunn’s Superman movie also introduces the “Justice Gang,” a team of corporate-sponsored superheroes that includes genius superhero Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), the ring-slinging Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), who coined the name, and the high-flying Hakwgirl (Isabela Merced).

In addition to the shape-shifting element man Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan) and the super-powered dog Krypto, Superman has ties to the wider DCU in the form of General Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), a character who appeared in Creature Commandos and will return in the upcoming Peacemaker season 2 on HBO Max.

“Here at DC, we have Metropolis, Gotham, Themyscira, Atlantis, Bialya… This is the world that we’re creating,” Gunn said when announcing the first phase of the DCU slate back in 2023. “We’re coming into a world where superheroes exist and have existed for some time in one form or another, and that’s the universe.”

On comparisons to the interconnected universe that is the MCU, Gunn added, “We are telling a big, huge central story that is like Marvel, except that I think we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work the story out completely.”

Superman marks the official beginning of that story when the film flies into theaters on July 11.