Lefty Hipster Doofus and King of Nepotism James Gunn Replaced by Skydance With a... Christian Normie

As you can imagine, there is much freaking out about this by the very-normal people who literally freak out about everything.

First: Why were Gunn and his business partner Peter Safran fired from co-leading DC on Film?

And note that it has been confirmed that he was fired, or instructed to "resign."

Variety:

After "Superman" landed in theaters last summer, former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was ready to pop Champagne. Although the movie had only been playing on the big screen for three days, he touted the "bold 10-year plan" of DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran and promised "the DC vision is clear" and "the momentum is real."

Fast forward a year and a half, and those plans have imploded. Gunn and Safran were dismissed from the top of the comic book empire, with Marvel Studios alum Jeremy Latcham taking over as president and chief creative officer of DC Studios.

...

The executive shuffle is yet another setback for DC Studios, which has struggled for years to compete with Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. Their short-lived leadership stint at DC follows multiple turnovers over the past decade, starting with comic book veterans Geoff Johns and Jon Berg and then Walter Hamada....

Gunn's "Superman," starring David Corenswet -- the duo's first big swing as bosses -- was touted as a hit with $618 million against a $225 million budget. Those ticket sales were promising enough, given the general decline in popularity of comic book movies. But they didn't necessarily signal the kind of lasting enthusiasm that spawns an interconnected universe. Momentum all but evaporated with July's money-loser "Supergirl," which flopped with $126 million globally against a $170 million budget. And while October's "Clayface" performed modestly with $109 million against a $44 million budget, sources suggest the body-horror thriller won't break even until the studio factors in downstream revenues.

I really liked -- maybe loved -- Gunn's reboot of The Suicide Squad. Some objected to him being put in charge of DC on Film -- the only thing he knows how to do, they said, was make crude jokes, inappropriate for young or normie audiences, and remake Guardians of the Galaxy, making every movie, even ones about a singular hero, into another story of a team of misfits learning together.

I dismissed that. Just because someone is good at one thing doesn't mean they aren't good at other things.

But I was wrong: He is incapable of writing anything but Guardians of the Galaxy Part IV.

And this is weird: Instead of focusing on DC's best-known heroes, he announced he'd be making movies about the third and fourth and fifth string heroes like -- and I know only stone-cold DC fans will even know what I'm talking about here -- Creature Commandos, Booster Gold, and The Authority.

If you're not a DC fan, you just read a bunch of words that mean absolutely nothing.

Let me tell you that as a DC fan myself, they only mean slightly more than nothing to me, too.

Insiders have raised eyebrows at Gunn and Safran's decision to focus on lesser-known characters, like Superman's cousin Kara El-Zor, aka Supergirl, and the Batman villain Clayface, rather than building out the franchise with marquee names.

I will give Gunn a half-pass for this choice, because the prior regime ruined many of the top DC characters, like Flash and Wonder Woman. (If you're thinking "But Wonder Woman was good," then I know you didn't see Wonder Woman '84. It was a disaster.)

Television efforts, too, were uneven. DC's main small-screen success was "The Penguin," a "Batman" spinoff led by Colin Farrell that was greenlit before Gunn and Safran took over. But the rest of the slate has generated less fanfare. Gunn's "Peacemaker" series, anchored by John Cena, debuted in 2022 before he stepped into the studio job. Although the initial season was popular, the second season -- which launched three years later -- failed to match the buzz of the first. "Lanterns," their first live-action TV show, had strong viewership and averaged 19 million viewers globally per episode going into the finale. Yet an insider at the company suggests the crime drama isn't quite capturing the zeitgeist, pointing out the show has yet to be renewed for a second season.

That one was also a disaster -- an anti-white woke screed about black supremacy.

Here's the good news: The Ellisons have decided to move away from the tasteless trashy woke hipster towards... a stone-cold normie who used to work for Marvel, when --- wait for it -- Marvel was good. He was part of Marvel from Iron Man through Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was just before the end of Marvel's golden age.

Internally, there's hope that Latcham -- an executive who helped shape the MCU -- will get back to basics with DC.

"Jeremy is the kind of guy who would go to Comic-Con to get an autograph from someone," says another source, "not someone who wants to be there signing autographs."

When Latcham was at Marvel, he'd question some edgy or divisive material, stating, "I don't think my grandmother would like this." Other executives would joke and propose things "if that would be all right with Jeremy's grandmother."

But apparently Jeremy's Grandmother was a good proxy for 85% of the normie audience.

Apparently Jermey Latcham is a Christian whose entire family lives near him on a giant spread in Texas, and who is dedicated to "mainstream, family-friendly, Christian-friendly" movies.

You can smell the artificial hormones burning over this.

THR:

It was Jeremy Latcham, a mild-mannered producer who was once a key member of Marvel Studios' exec team before moving to Texas to go independent.

An occasional foray into big-budget moviemaking such as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves notwithstanding...

Which is a really solid movie, despite failing at the box office.

...Latcham was focusing on inspirational movies such as the Wright Brothers feature Flyer for the faith-focused studio Wonder Project, where he also helped make House of David, a TV show about the biblical figure. The producer is known to be vocal about his Christian faith and his desire to make uplifting projects.

"I had this nagging feeling that I needed to do more movies that had deeper meaning to me," Latcham said of Wonder Project during an appearance on the Bible Bros podcast while promoting the Nate Bargatze comedy The Breadwinner. "Let's be the HBO for the faith and family audience. Let's try to make movies and television shows that restore faith in things worth believing in."

Despite being Christian, Latcham apparently fought with Marvel to give James Gunn the Guardians of the Galaxy gig.

So he's not against edgy or trashy material -- in the appropriate case.

In a twist, Latcham was instrumental in Gunn's rise, advocating for the niche director's hiring on Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy, which turned Gunn into an A-list filmmaker who commands eight-figure paydays for his directing work.

DC's heroes, who are intended to play to broad, traditional normie audiences including children, are not the right characters for the Gunn treatment.

There is speculation he might also clean house at DC comics itself, which has been on a mission to forefront homosexuality and sexuality-bend characters like the most popular Robin, Tim Drake, and the formerly-popular Superboy, into gays and bisexuals.

This, of course, is causing all sorts of shrieking and screaming.

Some of the people who have lobbied and demanded for every other DC character to be turned gay are complaining that the Latcham might jam his personal beliefs down our throats.

Can you even imagine such a thing??!!>

But no he won't, because he's a professional, not a bent and twisted activist.

I hope Latcham doesn't include any further material like this entirely-inappropriate scene from The Dark Knight Rises.

His grandma would definitely not approve.

Sorry, I just love Pete Holmes' Batman.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:22 PM

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