James Gunn Explains Why He Turned Down Directing Superman at First

Making a Superman movie under the old DC Films regime would have been “politically messy.”

July 8, 2025, 7:59pm

In 2021’s The Suicide Squad, marksman mercenary Bloodsport (Idris Elba) is imprisoned for putting Superman in the ICU with a kryptonite bullet — and that’s as close as writer-director James Gunn wanted to get to the DC Extended Universe’s Man of Steel. Gunn later revealed Warner Bros. “offered me whatever film I wanted to do, including some sort of Superman movie,” but the Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker opted for an ensemble of expendable supervillains in The Suicide Squad instead.

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“When I was originally offered to direct Superman back in 2018, I said no,” Gunn said at a Q&A hosted at the HMV Shop in London. “I was daunted by the task. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. Also, if you remember, there was other stuff happening with Superman at the time.”

Gunn implied that DC Films leadership at the time didn’t want to make a sequel to Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel with Henry Cavill reprising his role from the 2013 Superman reboot, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and 2017’s Justice League. “It was going to be politically messy,” Gunn said. “So I said no and I took The Suicide Squad, which was a more familiar type of group to me. Which I’m glad I did, that was fun.”

He contemplated including Superman in The Suicide Squad, saying at the time he had a “vague idea” of having Task Force X contend with “the most powerful hero in the world,” although he was unsure of the answer to questions like, “Who is Superman in the DCEU?” (The mind-controlling conqueror alien Starro ultimately made it into the film as the Squad’s mission.)

“But I kept thinking about Superman,” Gunn continued. “I couldn’t get it out of my head. ‘How would I do it if I did it? What would that movie be like? How could I make it work for today’s audience? How could it speak to people?’ And eventually started to think that maybe it was something I could do. So when they reapproached me with the idea for writing Superman three years ago, I said yes.”

Before Gunn and producer Peter Safran were hired to head the newly formed DC Studios in late 2022 — which Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav characterized as a “reset” for the comic book brand — Warner’s DC Films division had undergone a series of regime changes. Warner Bros. created DC Films in the wake of Batman v Superman, tapping Jon Berg and Geoff Johns to co-run the division and oversee a slate that at the time included a Justice League two-parter and Cyborg and Green Lantern movies scheduled for 2020.

In a shakeup of its DC operations following the critically panned underperformer Justice League in 2017, Warner Bros. brought on The Conjuring and It producer Walter Hamada as president of DC-based film production. Hamada’s tenure lasted through 2022, when Warner Bros. brass made the decision to scrap the Batgirl movie and Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam underwhelmed at the box office. Dan Lin (The Lego Movie, It) was courted to succeed Hamada, but negotiations fell through, and DC Films was facing crises on infinite fronts.

By 2022, Johnson was planning a Black Adam vs. Superman movie with Cavill returning for the Black Adam post-credits scene teasing the showdown, a direction that Hamada opposed. Reports in the press described the leaderless DC as the “Wild West,” with Johnson, Warner Bros. Pictures heads Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, and Gunn all making disparate plans. One week after The Hollywood Reporter leaked the disarray inside DC, it was announced that Gunn and Safran would serve as co-chairmen and CEOs of the new DC Studios to shepherd one unified DC Universe.

It begins when Superman soars into theaters July 11.