Peter James Mann
A (Somewhat) Brief History of How we Got Here
It would be an understatement to say that between The Big Two, Marvel is dominating the cinema landscape over DC’s several attempts at building their own cinematic universe.
The films we’ve gotten from Warner Bros. Pictures outside of the Batman Universe have been riddled with rewrites, reshoots, re-edits, and off-set drama resulting in very real people getting abused, hurt, and verbally berated with racial slurs and threats of their careers being destroyed.
Disney and Marvel, on the other hand, have been blessed with an executive producer that had an overarching vision for an episodic story: Kevin Feige. He is, by all accounts, The Man Behind the Curtain, the Wizard of Oz himself, pulling the strings of the fantastically powered puppets curated on the stage. This Great-Man-of-Cinema mentality gives him the allure of an auteur, someone who makes all the decisions and leads like a general.
And for years, people have pleaded with Warner Bros. to have a similar person leading the story. Granted, there have been attempts at this, but all of them felt as though they were in response to what Marvel was doing.
If Marvel was going light, they went dark. When they course corrected to become lighter, it was already after Marvel had decided to go darker with the end of the Infinity Saga. When Marvel added goofier humor with interacting characters, so did DC films like Aquaman, which feels the most Marvel-esque out of the whole catalog. It gave viewers like me aesthetic whiplash.
But much like a World War (which we seem to be on the precipice of, again), it is the mistakes of the winning side that can turn the tides of an entire campaign. Enter the unfortunate firing of James Gunn.
James Gunn was the Taika Watiki of his day at Disney. He had taken a seemingly impossible property to adapt, Guardians of the Galaxy, and turned a niche comic book series into a multimedia cornerstone for Marvel, making characters like Groot and Rocket Raccoon household names.
But in an attempt for revenge during the early days of the Cancel Culture Movement (which, granted, didn’t ACTUALLY Cancel all that many people, but absolutely exposed poor behavior), in which James Gunn was an advocate for, Twitter users pulled up receipts on James Gunn’s dark and inappropriate jokes during the early 2000s when he was a mainstay filmmaker for Troma Studios. Troma is known for B-Movie, extra gory horror films like Slither, written and directed by Gunn, and he was very much into shock humor as well.
In response, Disney fired James Gunn and initially said someone else would be directing the final Guardians films. Gunn had previously removed these posts from social media accounts and apologized for years prior to this. But Disney didn’t relent until after fans, and the entire central cast, penned letters to Disney and Marvel imploring them to re-hire the filmmaker. His final projects, The Guardian’s Christmas Special and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 are his last for Marvel and Disney.
Because during that brief time, Warner Bros. Pictures saw an opportunity…
