DC Studios — the sister company to DC Comics, the publisher of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman — announced a new slate of films and TV series on Tuesday that venture beyond the stories and worlds of the company’s aforementioned “Trinity” of super heroes.
Recently hired co-chairmen and CEOs James Gunn – the filmmaker best known for his turns with Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” series and DC’s “The Suicide Squad” – and Peter Safran – a producer who has helped steer some of DC more successful recent film entries, like “Aquaman” and “Shazam!” – helped lead the announcement, teasing a multiverse of adult-themed fare and kids animation alongside the core “DC Universe” offerings.
“What we’re doing with the DCU is we’re having animation tied directly into live action,” Gunn said in the company’s announcement. “Television, movies and games all intertwine within the same universe.”
Some of the projects, like the HBO Max series “Waller” — in which Viola Davis will reprise her character of Amanda Waller from the ”Suicide Squad” franchise — carry on from recent projects, like the acclaimed “Peacemaker” series.
Others, like the live-action films “Superman: Legacy,” “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” and Batman and Robin-centered “The Brave and the Bold,” and Wonder Woman prequel HBO Max series “Paradise Lost” are set to take new looks at long-loved characters in the Justice League universe.
The announced lineup also takes a crack at a specialty of Gunn’s: teams of underutilized misfits.
Animated series “Creature Commandos” uses a handful of heroes (Rick Flagg, Sr. and Nina Mazursky and G.I. Robot), villains (Doctor Phosphorous), monsters (Eric Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein) and weirdos (Weasel, recently briefly seen in “The Suicide Squad”). Live action film “The Authority” pulls together a handful of morally gray, any-means-necessary superheroes from DC’s Wildstorm comics imprint. A preview image includes glimpses of the Midnighter and Apollo (Batman and Superman analogues intertwined in a romance), among others.
Other projects peek in on long-beloved DC characters, like intergalactic police officers the Green Lantern Corps, lovable loser Booster Gold and anthropomorphic plant elemental Swamp Thing.
“We’re coming into a world where superheroes exist and have existed for some time in one form or another, and that’s the universe,” Gunn said. “We are telling a big, huge central story that is like Marvel, except that I think we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work the story out completely.”
Many of the projects announced Tuesday are being worked on, in some form, “but we’re remaining flexible and we’re going to adjust because we’re never going to put a project into production before the script is right,” Safran said. “This is a general timeline, but there will be flexibility within it.”
DC also clarified that the DC Universe slate announced Tuesday isn’t the end-all, be-all, and it doesn’t preclude other projects, like a sequel to 2022’s Robert Pattinson-led “The Batman” — which was explained as part of a separate “Elseworlds” universe, disconnected from the new offerings.
And while Gunn and Safran will be steering the ship, they plan to allow creators the freedom to showcase projects in their own styles, a counterpoint to frequent criticism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I want each project to have the feelings of the individual artist that’s working on it and to give them a lot of freedom—as long as it works—to create something special because what I’ve found through Marvel, what wasn’t exciting was when movies were tonally the same,” Gunn said. “(T)o see seemingly tonally incongruent things come together is part of the fun of all this.”
