Damage Control: why Warner Bros. keeps making a mess of the DC universe

Words: Dan Harrison

Warner Bros. keeps breaking its own DC universe because it never commits to one. James Gunn and Peter Safran’s exit from DC Studios, announced on Monday, lands barely a year into a plan that was supposed to run for a decade, and it follows a pattern the studio has repeated since the mid-2010s: hire a filmmaker-producer team, promise a clean slate, greenlight competing projects alongside it, change corporate owners mid-build, then start again. The characters survive. The scaffolding never does.

The timing is the strange bit. On the numbers Gunn and Safran had inherited the strongest DC run in years. 2025’s Superman relaunched the slate with critical approval and solid box office, HBO’s Lanterns turned into a ratings player and brought Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler into the fold, and October’s Clayface, a $40m R-rated thriller, passed $100m worldwide, guaranteeing the studio wouldn’t lose money on it. The misstep in the middle was this summer’s Supergirl, which trade coverage treated as a genuine embarrassment and which, awkwardly for Gunn, played like a Guardians of the Galaxy riff at a poin...