The DC Studios News Confirms: There Is No Ethical Consumption of Skydance Media
When Skydance took over Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ellison family argued that their politics – which had already infected CBS News, forcing out career journalists in favor of right-wing hacks – wouldn't impact CNN, or the rest of the Warner Bros. family as a whole.
Turns out, that wasn't ever true. Surprise!
[Disclaimer before we get too far: The author of this piece was an employee of PopCulture Media, a division of Paramount's CBS, until shortly before the Skydance merger in 2024.]
As we reported earlier today, DC Studios co-founders James Gunn and Peter Safran are out, replaced after four years by Marvel Studios veteran Jeremy Latcham. While Gunn's Peacemaker featured right-wing extremists as villains, Latcham is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. In a recent interview with the Bible Bros podcast, he lamented "demonic" R-rated movies in Hollywood and said that his faith drove his creative process.
Make no mistake: this is an attempt to drive DC toward the far right.
Latcham's role at Marvel was largely managerial, and so his right-wing views weren't really on display. It also helps that while the DC Universe has been fairly progressive so far, Marvel's cinematic universe eschewed secret identities in favor of making their Avengers agents of the State. The inherently authoritarian politics of that have been discussed at length elsewhere, so we'll skip that, but outside of progressive media bubbles, most audiences just kind of...accepted that as the evolution of the modern superhero. Gunn and Safran's DC Universe (along with Spider-Man: Brand New Day) pushed back against that dynamic in a meaningful way.
Skydance is run by David Ellison, the son of right-wing megadonor and AI goblin Larry Ellison, whose Oracle underpins so much of the internet that he has functionally limitless money to throw at unprofitable projects like helping his kid buy not one but two major Hollywood studios. The only catch is that once they own the studios, the content of the films and, yes, their news divisions is seemingly expected to line up behind Ellison (and, by extension, Donald Trump).
The WB deal was a questionable one from first principles: Skydance had already been saddled with enormous debt after buying Paramount, and it overpaid to take control of Warner Bros. Discovery, itself a company laden with debt it was unable to bring under control despite desperate cost-cutting efforts for pretty much the entirety of its short life. Before Discovery, AT&T had owned WB. That company, too, took on enormous debt to control Warners and then bailed on it when interest payments started to kick in.
There are likely other things involved, too – as Alex Zalben of Comic Book Club notes, it's likely that a quality-over-quantity filmmaker like James Gunn was never going to last long in an environment where the Skydance brass need to make 30 movies a year, and want a bunch of those to come from DC.
"Here’s what I’d venture was the biggest factor behind James Gunn and Peter Safran leaving DC Studios, and getting replaced with someone who is best known as an EP: Skydance has a mandate to produce 30+ movies a year because of the merger; there’s no way Gunn and Safran were ready to ramp up to that," Zalben posted on Threads. "Instead, the new guy will have a mandate to put out three DC movies a year total: a Batman movie every two years; a Justice League movie every three years; and fill in the rest from there. It won’t work, mind you, but I can almost guarantee that was the discussion and Gunn and Safran said 'nah.'"
Latcham's interview with Bible Bros is certainly instructive, but it's not fun to watch and obviously, if you watch it, you're going to be putting money into their pockets. We're going to embed it below because the information is likely valuable, and trust you to make an informed decision.
In his statement on the departure, Gunn was muted, saying only that he was exhausted by some of the things his job required and looked forward to taking some time to unwind after Man of Tomorrow wraps up.
“What only the closest people to me have known over the past four years is my time at DC Studios has been trying, to say the least,” Gunn wrote. “I dislike the at-times corporate nature of the job (thanks to Peter for taking the brunt of that). I’m always a very hard worker, but as a filmmaker I would at least get to take short breaks to unwind, and I’ve stolen even that time from both myself and my loved ones over the past four years (Jenn, I love you and I’m sorry and you don’t need to feel guilty for being the happiest of all people that I’m no longer doing this job). And the thing my ADHD hyperfocus has had the most difficulty with has been dividing my time between projects I’m incredibly passionate about and the ones I’m not so much and all the things I have to do as a studio head.”
It may also be that the massive box office haul of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, paired with Disney's sky-high expectations for Avengers: Doomsday has reset the unreasonable expectations for superhero movies that killed the DCEU. We'll likely never know what role, if any, the increased expectations may have played on the DC Universe, which generally had smaller budgets and smaller box office hauls than its Marvel competitors.
While some of the stars of Gunn and Safran's DC Universe are likely still under contract, it's unclear how many of them will stay on – and how much of the existing continuity will be retained at all. Those questions are unlikely to be answered before the 2027 release of Man of Tomorrow, which now faces the same uphill climb to feel "relevant" that The Flash did after Gunn's reboot was announced in 2022. That movie was a catastrophic bomb, but given its icy critical reception, not all of that can be hung on the end of the DC Extended Universe.
Nicholas Hoult, who played Lex Luthor in last year's Superman and made an appearance in Peacemaker, could be one of those who stays on. He very nearly starred in Skydance's upcoming HBO Max adaptation of the Harry Potter series, so it's clear reactionary politics aren't an obstacle to him accepting a job.
Gunn and Safran will continue to collaborate with DC at least until the projects they have already developed finish coming out. That includes Man of Tomorrow, a second season of Creature Commandos, and the in-production The People vs Gorilla Grodd. Even before the pair left DC, there were rumors that Peter Safran might take a role in management at Netflix once his DC Studios contract ended.
There's no indication that Safran and Netflix have met, but it wouldn't be surprising to see Gunn and Safran take on a project there once their calendar clears up a bit.
