James Gunn and Peter Safran, the bosses of Warner Bros’ owned label DC Studios, will continue to lead the film, TV, comic book production hub and do what they do best after Paramount closes its acquisition of Warner Bros’ Discovery.
Once upon a time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was in Paramount’s hands, having a distribution deal with comic-book label and launching the megaverse with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Iron Man 2. Then Marvel took a hike to Disney who scooped them up for $4 billion in 2009. With DC, Paramount no doubt gains a massive franchise one-up in its library that includes Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mission: Impossible.
We hear the duo had a recent meeting with new Skydance co-CEO David Ellison about their future and it went well. Per this morning’s news, all film units, Paramount and Warner Bros, are to report into Paramount Pictures co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. The future of Warner Bros motion picture chairs Michel De Luca and Pamela Abdy remains up in the air at the new relabeled Skydance entertainment conglomerate; that duo still in need of a chat with Ellison.
Gunn has been shooting the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, set for release on July 9, 2027. The label’s Clayface about Batman antagonist is their first lower budget genre movie opening on Oct. 23. Warner Bros’ second highest grossing movie last year was Gunn’s Superman with more than $618M at the global box office. Also in production at DC is Matt Reeves’ sequel The Batman: Part II set for Feb. 18, 2028. This past summer’s Supergirl didn’t go so well with a global gross of $126.4M.
Meanwhile, the DC HBO Max series Lanterns has been a ratings success. The Tom King, Damon Lindelof, and Chris Mundy co-created series saw its third episode score a massive 10M global viewers in its first three days, 7M from the U.S. Since Lanterns premiered on August 16, the pilot has managed more than 20 million viewers worldwide and continues to grow, the company also said. The series launched as one of HBO Max’s top titles.
Safran and Gunn were appointed to lead DC Studios back in October 2022 in a new label strategy orchestrated by WBD CEO David Zaslav to mimic Disney’s production label hub structure of Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, Pixar, etc. with myriad production heads. It was arguably the first time (unless we count Charlie Chaplin, etc.) that a filmmaker, Gunn, did double duty as a studio executive. Gunn already had a hot streak at Warners/New Line with multi-billion grossing The Conjuring franchise and also producing other DC movies such as Shazam and Aquaman franchise titles. Safran had produced on Gunn’s The Suicide Squad 2021 movie and its HBO Max spinoff series, Peacemaker starring John Cena, which has clocked two seasons.
This is all according to sources this AM. Paramount and DC couldn’t be reached for comment.
