Anyone who pays even a small amount of attention to the superhero movie industry is likely experiencing déjà vu this week. On Monday, Nov. 9, news broke that, after buying Warner Bros. for $110 billion (and DC with it), Skydance CEO and nepo baby supreme David Ellison had fired James Gunn and Peter Safran from their roles as co-CEOs of DC Studios. And so, the cycle begins again. To paraphrase a classic Warner Bros. movie, “This will be the third time we have rebooted the DC cinematic universe, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”
In the wake of all this chaos — What happens now to Gunn’s upcoming Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow? Or Lanterns season 2? — someone else has been getting a lot of praise for keeping his own rival superhero franchise afloat. Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige was already widely considered to be one of the most successful film producers of the 21st century, but after watching DC crash out yet again, that praise is only getting louder. One viral social media post this week even called Feige a “generational talent.”
But is that really the case? Sure, Feige may have a passion for the stories he tells through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a deep knowledge of the comic book source material, and a knack for the kind of big picture thinking that got us four massive Avengers movies with a fifth rapidly approaching. That all clearly takes talent and hard work, but there’s one other thing Feige has that nobody at DC or Warner ever experienced: a stable movie studio without constant turmoil.
Marvel was only two movies deep into the MCU when Disney bought the company in 2009, meaning that for the past 17 years, Feige has been able to run his studio pretty much however he sees fit (although there were some close calls). This freedom allowed him to come up with long-term plans and then execute on them, building his empire piece by piece until we ultimately reached the apex that was Avengers: Endgame.
Of course, even the MCU isn’t totally free from corporate meddling. It’s clear now that Disney’s larger push into streaming at the start of the 2020s ultimately diluted both the Marvel and Star Wars brands. That was perhaps the only clear example in the last two decades of Feige being forced to make a bad decision because of C-suite demands, and it only proves the benefit of letting the guy who’s actually running the franchise make his own choices. That was the goal when Warner hired Gunn and Safran, giving them control over their own studio and a direct line to the CEO, but unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself — especially if you work for DC.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the modern superhero movie era. After Christopher Nolan breathed new life into the entire genre with his Batman trilogy, director Zack Snyder came in as the architect of a DC Extended Universe meant to compete with Marvel. Snyder’s Man of Steel arrived one year after The Avengers in 2013. The DCEU was already racing to catch up. Given enough time, perhaps it could have. (Financially, it arguably did. Batman v. Superman earned $874 million at the box office, and Aquaman cracked $1 billion.)
Behind the scenes, however, the DCEU was pure chaos. Snyder left in 2017 due to a personal tragedy, handing off an unfinished Justice League to Joss Whedon, who did his best to turn Snyder’s gritty, maximalist film into Temu Avengers. Meanwhile, official control of the DCEU quietly passed from Geoff Johns and Jon Berg (appointed in 2016 to launch the interconnected franchise) to Walter Hamada, who took over in 2018 and led a more siloed, standalone effort that yielded Joker and Matt Reeves’ The Batman.
Both approaches had their positives and negatives, but the overall whiplash (only compounded by Warner getting bought and sold multiple times) made it impossible to build a coherent movie strategy that fans could grab onto. Meanwhile, in the same handful of years, Feige and co. cruised from Captain America: Civil War to Avengers: Endgame, telling an impressively linear story across almost a dozen movies while introducing popular characters like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange to the MCU.
By the time Gunn showed up in 2022, it was clear DC needed a fresh start. Whether he was the right guy to do it will likely be debated for years to come, but there’s no denying that Gunn never had the same sort of opportunity as Feige. What we got in the last four years was one very solid Superman movie to launch the DC Universe, two forgettable films about minor comic book characters, and a few TV shows that were mostly quite good but never really felt part of a larger story.
In the grand scheme of things, Gunn didn’t get that much time to build his empire, but he didn’t exactly make the best use of the time he did have either. Maybe a more cohesive strategy would have helped. Or maybe a stronger emphasis on tentpole characters like Batman and Wonder Woman could have bought him a few more years.
Then again, it’s not like Iron Man and Thor were most kids’ favorite Marvel heroes growing up. Feige just had more time and freedom to tell the story he believed in than Gunn ever did, and that’s always been his greatest superpower as the head of Marvel Studios.