James Gunn wants the DC Universe to avoid one of the MCU’s biggest mistakes

By Alex Welch Published November 30, 2024

It’s still early days for the DC Universe. The highly anticipated, multimedia franchise hasn’t even released its first film yet (that’ll be 2025’s Superman) and is only now on the verge of rolling out its debut TV show, an animated Suicide Squad spin-off titled Creature Commandos. Nonetheless, DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn already has some very clear ideas about what he wants the DCU to be, as well as what he doesn’t want it to be.

In an interview with Collider, Gunn said that he doesn’t want the interconnectivity of the DCU to bog down the franchise or make viewers feel like they need to do “homework” in order to keep up with it. “A lot of what DC is, and the fun for me, really, is in the world-building, not just the story-building. I don’t think of DCU as being, ‘Oh, this is a story we’re telling over multiple films and TV shows about one big bad.’ I don’t want to have to do, as an audience member, the homework to have to see every single thing,” Gunn explained. “It is more of a connected universe that exists within one place, which is the DCU.”

Gunn’s comments may come as a surprise to some comic book fans. Previously, the filmmaker has talked heavily about the planned cohesiveness of the DCU, even going so far as to promise that those who voice animated versions of certain characters will usually be the same actors who play whatever flesh-and-blood iterations of them appear in the franchise’s live-action projects. That said, while it sounds like Gunn wants to make sure there are very few continuity issues within the DCU (including in its casting choices), he has also now made it clear that he doesn’t want the franchise’s projects to be weighed down by issues of canon or crossover-style storytelling.

That should come as a bit of a relief, considering that other multimedia franchises — namely, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — have struggled in recent years to manage the increasingly unwieldy size of their multi-year stories and ever-growing in-universe histories. It sounds like that’s one problem that, despite its sizable lineup of forthcoming projects, the DC Universe is already being primed to avoid.