DC fans can exhale. Amid all the shake-ups that come with Hollywood’s biggest merger, James Gunn and Peter Safran are staying in charge of DC Studios.
The duo will continue leading the film, TV and comic book production hub after Paramount closes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The outlet reports that Gunn and Safran recently met with David Ellison, who will lead the combined company, to talk about their future, and that the meeting went well.
The news landed on the same day Ellison revealed the merged company’s new name. The combined Paramount and Warner Bros. will simply be called Skydance. “We wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. – and all our extraordinary brands – to remain in the spotlight,” Ellison wrote on X.
Not everyone is getting the same reassurance. Deadline reports that all film units, at both Paramount and Warner Bros., will report to Paramount Pictures co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy are reportedly exiting the studio as the deal closes.
For DC, staying the course means a busy slate. Gunn’s Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, is set for July 9, 2027. Before that comes Clayface, the label’s first lower-budget genre movie, which opens Oct. 23. Polygon notes that the Batman villain horror film was written by Mike Flanagan. Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II is also in production for a Feb. 18, 2028 release.
An Andy Muschietti-directed Batman film titled The Brave and the Bold, James Mangold’s Swamp Thing and an untitled Wonder Woman movie are also in development.
The track record so far has been mixed on the big screen. Gunn’s Superman earned more than $618 million worldwide and was Warner Bros.’ second-highest-grossing movie of last year, per Deadline, while this summer’s Supergirl stalled at $126.4 million globally. Television has been a brighter spot. Deadline reports that the HBO Max series Lanterns, co-created by Tom King, Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy, saw its third episode reach 10 million global viewers in its first three days, and its pilot has been seen by more than 20 million viewers worldwide since the show premiered Aug. 16.
Gunn and Safran were appointed to lead DC Studios in October 2022, in a structure designed to mirror Disney’s label setup for Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm and Pixar. And there’s a fun bit of history in all this: Deadline notes that Paramount once distributed Marvel’s early MCU films, including Iron Man and Thor, before Marvel moved to Disney. Now, with DC, Paramount gets a superhero universe of its own.
Is this the stability the DCU needed, or are you still waiting to see what Clayface and Man of Tomorrow bring? Sound off.
