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James Gunn on What DC Studios Learned From Marvel Studios Rollback

James Gunn on Marvel Studios growing and then rolling back the number of MCU films and series, and what DC Studios learned from that.

Last week, we made the case that the current state of affairs that Disney-owned Marvel Studios' MCU is going through shouldn't be blamed on the streamer series and more on how the the folks who make the decisions made some horrible decisions in the midst of trying to come out the victor once the smoke cleared from "The Great Streaming Wars." For example, creating a lot of original franchise programming – and then keeping all of it exclusive to your streamer. That's great if you're the only one doing it, but when everyone's doing it? That's a problem. In the end, Netflix pretty much kept the crown, and a lot of media companies were left to lick their wounds – and do a lot of hacking and slashing in terms of cutting costs. In terms of "The Mouse," that meant rolling back and spreading out the number of films and shows Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, and others were putting out. That was a topic that DC Studios co-CEO and writer/director James Gunn was asked about during an interview with Rolling Stone that went live earlier today. But first, a little historical perspective…

During an interview with CNBC from back in July 2023, The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger made it clear that change was on the way when it came to the number of films and series Marvel Studios would be putting out moving forward. "You pull back not just to focus, but also as part of our cost containment initiative. Spending less on what we make, and making less," Iger shared, offering Marvel's move into original streaming content as an example. "Marvel is a great example of that. It had not been in the television business at any significant level, and not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of TV series," he added. "Frankly, it diluted focus and attention." Less than a year later, Iger offered more specifics on what the reduction would look like. "We're slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three," Disney's CEO shared during the company's quarterly earnings call in May 2024.

During his conversation with Rolling Stone, the topic of Marvel Studios acknowledging that it believes it was putting out too much too quickly – a belief a long-time Marvel executive producer apparently shared with Gunn. "Louis [D'Esposito] said that privately to me. I don't even know if it's really their fault." In response to the interviewer noting that Marvel Studios was under a "corporate mandate" to have the MCU on the big and small screens as much as possible, Gunn added, "That wasn't fair. It wasn't right. And it killed them." In terms of any lessons learned from Marvel Studios' experience that are being applied to how DC Studios operates, Gunn reaffirmed the company's commitment to treating "every project as if we're lucky" to have it and not moving forward until a screenplay gets locked in.

"We have to treat every project as if we're lucky. We don't have the mandate to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we're going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality," Gunn explained. "We're obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible. Nothing goes before there's a screenplay that I personally am happy with."

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