Well, it wasn’t quite faster than a speeding bullet, but it was still pretty quick: James Gunn and Peter Safran, the co-CEOs of the DC Studios division of Warner Bros., are stepping down after just four years in the role. Former Marvel Studios executive Jeremy Latcham will serve as the new president and chief creative officer, reporting directly to leadership at Skydance, the company that recently acquired Warner Bros. and also owns Paramount. (At Warner, DC was set up as its own separate studio; as with their Marvel equivalents at Disney, the iconic WB shield didn’t even appear in front of the new DC movies.)

Though Gunn and Safran took the job in the fall of 2022, they had a whole slate of previous-regime DC movies to release throughout 2023, with Gunn’s universe-relaunching Superman put into pre-production during that period. That movie was a sizable hit in 2025, and was followed this year by the flop companion piece Supergirl and the stand-alone villain horror movie Clayface, which is currently doing respectable business on a modest budget. The universe also extended to the recent hit HBO show Lanterns; the other live-action TV projects were continued from the previous DC era (the second season of the Gunn-supervised Peacemaker) and set in a separate universe (The Penguin).

The main question from a creative point of view is whether the nascent state of the DCU will make it easy or preferable for Latcham to reboot the universe from scratch. To this end, Gunn and Safran seem to have left the DCU flexible; it would be equally easy to continue, or to curtail with relatively little fuss. There are actually no DCU movies currently in production; Man of Tomorrow is in post, preparing for its summer 2027 release, and there’s a Jimmy Olsen-centric TV series now shooting. The delay-plagued but in-production The Batman Part II, like The Batman and The Penguin, isn’t part of this universe (though there may be pressure to incorporate them somehow going forward). Gunn and Safran’s tenure could essentially wrap as an extended Superman project: Two main Superman movies, a Supergirl spinoff, and a pair of TV shows that share some characters and ideas with them.

This also means the DCU would be pretty easy to continue with the same continuity, even while changing direction. Gunn, in a statement published on Threads, has indicated that this may be the case. “That’s not to say Peter and I are done with DC of superheroes,” he writes. “We have Man of Tomorrow out this summer. And we’ve just been engaged on another DC project which I’m writing, and we’ll see where it goes after that. And of course, the characters we set up will live on.” This all may depend on the performance of Man of Tomorrow, but it seems like Gunn is hoping to take on a role more akin to Joss Whedon or Jon Favreau during the early years of the MCU — someone who can help shape the universe and characters via writing and directing, but has no executive duties (which Gunn, in this Threads statement, alludes to largely disliking).

In that sense, it’s probably healthy not to treat guiding a multimedia superhero franchise as a lifetime appointment, a la Marvel’s Kevin Feige. These movies should not be so rigorous as to requite the full-time attention of a single (or dual) overlord for decades. A filmmaker serving as CEO was always going to cause some friction on either side of that arrangement.

It’s hard to be sure that Skydance understands what’s good about the current (and admittedly early-days) DCU, though, when they’ve hired a Marvel guy to do the job instead. The previous set of these movies was looked at as a failure for not engaging in a Marvel-like cultural domination, but the fact is, from 2013 through 2023 there was a series of DC superhero movies that ran for a full decade, yielded more big hits than mega-flops, and showed remarkable creative dexterity (which is to say, a botched Justice League didn’t prevent them from making excellent Wonder Woman or Aquaman movies). The series was at its worst when it got sweatily desperate for that Avengers magic (and also when it explicably let The Rock think he was in charge of it, though the resulting movie actually did quite well for a C-tier character). The reason there isn’t a whole fleet of DC projects that need to change direction mid-voyage is that Gunn and Safran didn’t seem gung-ho about rushing a whole universe’s worth of #content into production.

That doesn’t mean their instincts were always spot-on. Though the Supergirl movie has some great stuff and has been generally underrated, it’s based on even-better source material that someone, whether Gunn or higher-ups at Warner Bros., seemingly wanted to neuter. But the movies and shows so far have also more or less stood alone; even Supergirl, explicitly a Superman spinoff, doesn’t really require knowledge of anything from the previous movie to be understood. Moreover, at a time when Marvel itself seems desperate to recapture the all-in crossover energy of peak Avengers mania, it’s been refreshing to see a superhero universe seemingly less concerned with building toward some yet-to-be-determined event. Even the developing projects Gunn discussed in the press — a rebooted Wonder Woman movie, a project featuring the “Bat-family” characters who haven’t had much time in the recent Batman films — didn’t point to the TV-style Season Finale of Avengers: Infinity War.

Gunn and Safran seemed determined to sell each project on more or less its own merits, looking at the intra-universe connectivity as more of a nice bonus for people who really care about this stuff. That may not help an expensive movie like Supergirl, where audiences clearly didn’t feel like they needed to see it to stay up to date on the Superman family, but it seems to have aided Clayface, which managed to make a $40 million movie out of a relatively minor Batman villain without needing to create Bat-sized expectations. Audiences gave it a surprisingly robust A- CinemaScore, indicating they found it satisfying on its own terms, indicating that in this rapidly shifting filmgoing environment, superheroes and their universes might have to be willing to go a little smaller or more off-model to find ways to surprise and delight the audience, even if that means counterintuitively sacrificing some of their former spectacle.

That seems like a major win for the newly swollen Skydance and its supposed commitment to release 30 movies a year for at least several years. After all, how many of those can be marquee-level superhero mega-productions? Maybe the real answer at the heart of this executive shift, as it often tends to be, is just plain more. To hell with the lessons of the past few years, when audiences have seemed hesitant to auto-play any superhero adventure that flies into the multiplex. Skydance has movies to mass-market around the globe, and Gunn may not have been moving fast enough to keep up.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.