Superman isn’t due in theaters until July 11, but writer-director James Gunn is already getting up, up and away on his next project. The filmmaker, who heads DC Studios with producer Peter Safran, is producing the now-shooting Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow as the second film in the newly unified DC Universe, which launched with the animated series Creature Commandos (written and executive produced by Gunn). With the show wrapping its seven-episode first season earlier this month, Gunn confirmed he’s begun “pre-writing” a mysterious new project.
“The bulk of my time is dealing with post-production on Superman and Peacemaker, but I’m also spending a fair amount of time pre-writing my next DC Studios project,” Gunn wrote in a post shared to Threads, adding he’s also “watching dailies and offering ideas on the other projects. It’s much less overwhelming than when I was directing.”
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In December, it was announced Max renewed Creature Commandos season 2. Gunn, who wrote all seven episodes of the first season, is likely scripting the new season of the series from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation. (The season finale introduced a new team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions too dangerous for humans, including the fan-favorite King Shark from Gunn’s Suicide Squad redo.)
Another possibility: The Authority. First announced as part of the DC Studios slate along with the feature films Superman (originally titled Superman: Legacy), Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Swamp Thing, and the DCU Batman reboot The Brave and the Bold, Gunn has described The Authority — about a team of superheroes with a zero tolerance approach to superheroics as a sort of anti-Justice League — as “one of my real passion projects.”
When announcing the adaptation of the WildStorm comic book by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, Gunn said, “I’ve been working really hard on it with the writers and we’re starting to put together the entire story. This is a big movie. … WildStorm was a comics imprint that was bought by DC that I really love. We’re moving a lot of these WildStorm characters into the DCU.”
“The Authority’s a very different kind of superhero story,” he continued. “They are basically good-intentioned, but they think that the world is completely broken and the only way to fix it is to take things into their own hands, whether that means killing people, destroying heads of state, changing governments — basically, whatever they want to do to make the world better. We’ll see how that journey goes for them. There are morally gray characters [in our DCU], of which these are.”
Superman introduces one of the original members of The Authority in The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), whose liquid metal body is infused with Nanomachines that allow her to interface with machines and shapeshift into any object she imagines.
Gunn wrote the upcoming second season of The Suicide Squad spinoff starring John Cena as the vigilante Peacemaker, and directed episodes with Greg Mottola (Superbad), Alethea Jones (High Potential), and Peter Sollett (Evil). He’s producing Clayface, a spinoff film about the Batman villain written by Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep), and the HBO drama series Lanterns from Chris Mundy (Ozark), Damon Lindelof (Lost), and comic book writer Tom King (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Mister Miracle).
Also in development from DC Studios is The Brave and the Bold. The film will introduce the DCU Batman and Robin (Bruce Wayne’s son, Damian Wayne) and is being directed by Andy Muschietti (The Flash), although Gunn said in December that the script needed work. In January 2023, Gunn and Safran said that their DC Studios is “never going to put a project into production before the script is right.”
DC Studios’ Superman — written and directed by Gunn and starring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor — is the first film of the new DCU when it flies into theaters on July 11.
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