On the eve of James Gunn’s highly anticipated Superman film, the Wall Street Journal released a quantitative report that essentially signaled the film as Warner Bros.’ last chance to make its comic book brand soar. No pressure. However, within the lengthy, half-pop culture, half-financial report was the revelation that Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav turned down a script for a Black Superman movie in 2022 because he felt it was too woke.
According to the WSJ, the Black Superman script, which was penned by Ta-Nehisi Coates and had producer J.J. Abrams attached as far back as 2021, would’ve seen the Man of Steel in a tale set in the civil rights era. But the take, which injected an air of excitement among fans online at the time in the wake of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, ultimately did not move forward.
As the WSJ notes, this period in DC saw Warner Bros. essentially on the verge of its wits’ end for how to reboot a cinematic universe. Key focal points for the company were anchoring its cinematic universe in a film that wasn’t as grim and gritty as its previous attempts, which were narratively incongruous and failed to captivate audiences at the box office beyond opening weekend. Around the same time, Warner Bros. executives sought a solution by meeting with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige in an attempt to convince him to switch sides. Those talks, according to WSJ, “fizzled.”
Instead, Warner Bros.’ attempted headhunting at Marvel would yield fruit in an albeit messy sequence of events when it got Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn to join Team Blue, first as the director of 2021’s The Suicide Squad and later as the head of DC Studios alongside Peter Safran. This, as the WSJ states, was a part of Warner Bros.’ new strategy to have an executive team oversee all DC media, effectively making them take full responsibility for the superhero brand’s fate.
Although Coates’ Black Superman film ended up not happening, Gunn told io9 back in 2023 he hasn’t written out the possibility of a Black Kryptonian film appearing sometime down the road.
“Those two things [Gunn’s own Superman movie and a potential future Black Superman project] are totally unrelated,” Gunn explained. “That’s an exciting movie. I know that Chantal Nong, who is the executive on that project, is extremely excited about it. So if it comes in and it’s great, which I haven’t read the script, and if the timing is right, that could absolutely happen. That’s totally unrelated. It would be an Elseworlds tale like Joker.”
As for the temperature of DC Studios now, Warner Bros.’ strategy moving forward is to present a leaner output of movies and TV shows with narrative unity. In the Gunn-Safran era, the modus operandi will be to release one animated and two live-action films a year as well as TV show spin-offs on HBO Max, a strategy backed up by the WSJ’s reporting.
But the buck, both literally and figuratively, rests on the caped shoulders of Gunn’s Superman movie to steer the ship toward sunnier horizons for Warner Bros. Although Gunn initially turned down DC’s proposal to direct a Superman film in 2018, he would later find the spark to helm a movie that he hopes will resonate with people and appeal to today’s audience. So far reviews have been mixed on the film, with our own Germain Lussier giving the movie a glowing review, and it’s predictably already entered the culture wars. But the brass tacks of the film’s financial takeaway place the scales significantly enough away from its accolades to offset whatever cultural cache the film garners as the latest iteration of a pop culture icon.
With a reported budget of $225 million, the David Corenswet-led film doesn’t just have to gross more than $500 million globally to please Warner Bros. executives (a cash point WSJ notes is a fraction of the size of Marvel’s blockbuster films), it also has to fly under the scrutiny of being box office pocket watched in comparison to Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which releases July 21. Hopefully, Superman‘s tagline, “Look up,” will also encompass its box office takeaway needle soaring to new heights for DC Studios.
Gizmodo has reached out to Warner Bros. for comments regarding points raised by the WSJ report, and will update this post if we hear back. Superman is in theaters now.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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