Our Plea to the New DC Studios Head: No More Shared Universe!

The MCU is a miracle to have existed, and it made sense for DC to want its own, but we're well beyond that. Just make good movies instead.

The DCU is dead before it even started.

Four years ago, DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran relaunched the comics brand with grand ambitions to build a Marvel Cinematic Universe of their own with a crop of characters they believed to be superior to what Marvel and Disney had. They controlled Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, and a whole bunch more they could mold as they saw fit, and they promised they would fix the flawed Marvel Studios system of greenlighting projects before a strong screenplay was in place. They announced a massive slate of 10 films and series right out of the gate and had other expectations that stars they cast today would appear in future DC films for the long haul. Above all, they were going to be careful with the brand.

“No one was minding the mint,” Gunn said back in January 2023 in a telling quote. “They were just giving away IP like they were party favors to any creators who smiled at them. What we are going to do is promise that everything from our first project going forward is going to be unified.”

The real world quickly caught up to Gunn and Safran. In a move beyond their control, ownership of DC Studios changed hands yet again from Warner Bros. Discovery to Skydance, and now just four years, three films, and a couple of TV shows into their tenure, they’re out. Taking the reins is Jeremy Latcham, not a household name the way Kevin Feige or some of his lieutenants have been, but an architect of the early stages of the MCU and a key, former executive at Marvel (he left for an independent label of his own in 2017). He has comic book chops, having produced “The Avengers,” the first MCU “Spider-Man,” and more.

Because the ball didn’t really get rolling at DC Studios in the short time Gunn and Safran were on board, and because Latcham still has a lingering slate that includes a second “Superman” movie that’s already in the can and a second “The Batman” movie in the works that isn’t even connected to the DCU anyway, as he begins to map out his own ambitions for the next era of DC movies and series, we have a simple plea: no more shared universes. Please. We beg you. Enough already.

Do not try and build the next MCU or even the next DC(E)U or whatever you want to call it. Just make some really good superhero movies with the characters and brands people love.

Books have been and will be written about the producing success story Kevin Feige managed with the MCU, and David Ellison, fanboy that he is, would surely love to have his own version of “The Avengers.” Who wouldn’t? We’ve seen other studios try and recreate the MCU formula with their own IP, like the Godzilla vs. Kong-iverse from WB and Legendary or the incredibly misguided plan for a Universal monster-verse that fizzled out with Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy.“

Truth be told, Marvel is trying to reconstruct its own formula ever since “Avengers: Endgame,” and it has been a mixed bag. Sure, there were a few billion-dollar hits in there like “Deadpool & Wolverine” and this year’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” and “Avengers: Doomsday” too figures to be huge, but other new characters and would-be franchises like “Eternals” or “Shang-Chi” have gone through fits and stops. Movies like a “Blade” reboot have never been able to get off the ground as Marvel tries to fit a square peg into a round hole. Marvel has been forced to recast and scramble its carefully laid plans amid the controversy around Jonathan Majors. And the sheer glut of TV shows over the last few years has created immense homework for people that has led the actual flagship movies to drop off precipitously at the box office.

Is that what DC Studios really wants? More of that drama and headache? It feels like we’re well beyond the era where audiences are willing to commit for every new episode of a yearslong cinematic saga. Surely whatever vision Gunn and Safran had was grand, especially if you’re a real fan of those characters and want to see them all come together as the Justice League yet again, but it doesn’t feel like today’s young audiences want to sign up for that.

Gunn and Safran actually immediately ran into this problem as they tried to bridge the gap between the old DCEU and the new DCU they were building. People knew “The Flash” and “Aquaman 2” weren’t going to be part of the future, even as Gunn and Safran paid lip service to the idea and played coy about having some of these actors reprising their roles in the new universe. (Remember when Henry Cavill thought for a minute he was playing Superman again?) The films underwhelmed at the box office as a result, and it created confusion among casual fans as the execs were forced to dance around the fanboys and the Snyder Army.

Audiences, though, have demonstrated that superhero movies still matter when they feature characters they care about. “Spider-Man” stayed away for about five years, and “Brand New Day” is now one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. We hadn’t had a proper, standalone “Superman” movie in years, and it proved to be a great launching pad for Gunn’s slate, earning $618.7 million worldwide. There’s still huge excitement for “The Batman: Part II” from Matt Reeves, and there’s never been any pretense that it’s connected to some more important lore or that Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne might show up in a theoretical “Wonder Woman” sequel a decade down the road. People just really like Batman.

So what do you do now if you’re Latcham and have to answer to Ellison and former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz? It would make sense to just demonstrate how you’re going to make the most of the IP that you have. Signaling to audiences (and shareholders) that your next Wonder Woman movie won’t come out until 2037 because you’re mapping out the shared universe for how to carefully introduce all these characters doesn’t sound like the best approach. Just hire smart writers, entrust visionary directors, and make some good movies. It worked with “The Batman.”

This, of course, does not mean don’t make your big “Justice League” team up movie or don’t build a new franchise out of “Teen Titans.” It just means that times and appetites have changed from the pre-Covid and even pre-streaming boom MCU era when “Guardians of the Galaxy” could be a hit (in part) because of how it teased the arrival of Thanos and the Infinity Stones. Audiences have become more discerning about what they define as an event film, and DC Studios can beat Marvel at its own game so long as DC stops trying to become Marvel.

Start by being the best version of DC.