I don’t have a ton of time so I’m writing this post off the cuff. Buyer beware. When I heard that James Gunn was gone just four years into his regime at DC, I was a little shocked. I mean, I knew with the barely acceptable box office of Clayface that something was coming. I’m not sure I knew they were going to completely destroy DC.
If you’re looking for a breakdown of how badly things went, Variety has an article on the implosion. But what interests me isn’t so much the business side of this disaster. It’s the writing side.
Because the more I look at what Gunn was trying to do, the more I realize that a lot of his instincts were good. So how did it all go wrong? More importantly, what can screenwriters learn from it?
Let’s start with something that made me laugh. After making Superman, Gunn said it was the greatest filmmaking experience of his life. And my immediate reaction was, “Well of course it was! For the first time in your career, you were making a movie with no oversight. You were the boss! I’d be pretty happy with that kind of freedom myself.”
After Gunn got fired, he immediately went to his favorite place, Twitter, to chat with the people. He talked about how much he hated the administrative side of running DC Studios. The meetings. The endless responsibilities that came with overseeing a studio.
Does that sound familiar?
It should. Because I would argue that WE’RE ALL JAMES GUNN.
Every aspiring screenwriter who works a job they don’t particularly love so they can pay the bills is dealing with this problem. You want to write. You want to create. You want to spend your day coming up with amazing characters and unforgettable scenes. But you can’t. Because you’ve got a job. And that job doesn’t give a shit about your dreams.
That job wants you there at 9 a.m. It wants you to answer emails. It wants you to deal with annoying customers and impossible deadlines and that coworker who somehow turned a five-minute minor issue into a three-hour meeting.
By the time you’re finished? You’re exhausted. Your brain is fried. The last thing you want to do is write. And this is where James Gunn gets a lot of credit.
THE MAN WRITES.
He wrote Superman. He wrote Man of Tomorrow. He’s probably rewriting all these other DC movies and shows. He recently wrote another secret project.
That’s the mentality you need. Because it’s easy to convince yourself that your circumstances are difficult. That nobody understands how draining your job is. That if you could just get six months off, you could finally write that screenplay. But the truth is, there’s never going to be a perfect time.
You’re always going to have responsibilities. You’re always going to have something competing for your attention. And if you’re waiting for the day when writing becomes convenient, you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life.
It reminds me of that one aspiring writer from the early days of Scriptshadow who some of you may remember. He sent me a screenplay and explained he’d written the entire thing on his phone. Every day, during his commute to work, he’d pull out his phone and write. I remember making fun of that script because, well, it definitely READ like it had been written on a phone.
But looking back, I realize I was focused on the wrong thing. The screenplay wasn’t bad because he’d written it on his phone. It was bad because he was a beginner screenwriter.
From a purely hustling standpoint, the fact that he wrote a screenplay on the way to work every day was fucking inspiring. I remember that he had a family and, technically, no time to write during the day. SO HE MADE TIME.
I read a similar story about a book editor, Gail Honeyman, who not-so-secretly wanted to be an author. But her day job of editing made it difficult. So she freaking got up 2 hours earlier every morning, at 5am, and wrote then. SHE MADE TIME. And she ended up writing a really great book called Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.
These people get things done. And that’s the exact mentality you need. If you’ve got 30 minutes, write for 30 minutes. If you’ve got an hour, write for an hour. If you’ve got an electric car, set it to automatic drive on your commute and write then. Okay, maybe don’t do that. I don’t want to be sued if you plow into a Yum Yum donut shop. Unless it’s a really good scene. Then it may be worth it.
And that’s the big lesson I take away from James Gunn’s DC experience. No matter how busy you are, no matter how demanding your job is, no matter how mentally exhausted you feel, you have to figure out a way to write.
Now let’s talk about the actual DC movies, because one of the biggest criticisms of Gunn’s approach was that he kept focusing on characters who weren’t popular. Supergirl. Clayface. Green Lantern.
Meanwhile, the biggest character in the entire DC universe was sitting right there. Danuhnuhnuh Danuhnuhnuh BAAAATMAAAAAN!
And somehow, Gunn never got to use him. Somehow, Matt Reeves, who takes longer to make a movie than some ice ages, had veto power over Gunn, the head of the company, for using Robert Pattinson. And we’re not ever sure that Gunn liked Pattinson. As I’m writing this I’m realizing there’s a very good possibility that Gunn was fired because of Batman. Because if he got to make a Batman film, for sure he has a shot at a billion dollar gross. And if he has a billion dollar DC superhero movie on his resume, they ain’t firing him this week.
Despite that, I still get why Gunn was choosing the characters he chose. Supergirl was about a deeply troubled woman dealing with grief, trauma, and addiction. If we’re all being honest with ourselves, that’s a pretty interesting starting point for a superhero movie.
Then you have Clayface. A body-horror movie about a man whose identity is literally falling apart. That’s a potentially incredible vehicle for exploring identity, self-worth, and what happens when someone loses the thing that defines them.
Then there’s Lanterns. Gunn wanted to explore what happens when a superhero gets older. What happens when the excitement wears off? When a guy who’s spent his life being celebrated starts coasting on that reputation? Put that character alongside a younger, more idealistic Green Lantern, and suddenly you’ve got a slick sounding buddy-cop show.
Again, that’s a legitimate dramatic premise.
So why didn’t any of these ideas work? Well, because screenwriting is a very, very, very, VERY tricky thing. You see, a screenplay is, and will always be, a living breathing organism.
When you sit down to write one of these slippery suckers, you have an idea of what movie you’re going to write. You know the tone. You know the characters. You know what the story is supposed to be about. Then you start writing and somewhere along the way, the screenplay starts talking back to you.
It says, “You know that movie you wanted to write? Well, I actually think it’d be more interesting if we went in THIS direction.” And you think, “Huh. That’s actually a pretty good idea.” So you follow it. And since your plot starts changing, your characters have to change. Which means their arcs have to change. Which means the theme has to change.
Before you know it, you’re writing a different movie from the one you originally conceived. This happens ALL THE TIME in writing. And here’s the problem. Sometimes the new movie is better. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you’ve followed a bunch of individually interesting ideas into a screenplay that no longer has an identity.
And I suspect something like that happened with Supergirl. My guess is that the original vision was a much more melancholy character in line with the Woman of Tomorrow comic it was based on. But somewhere during the development process, the movie started moving toward a conventional James Gunn-style space adventure. More humor. More colorful characters.
And the problem is that those two movies don’t necessarily fit together. One wants to be an introspective drama about grief and loss. The other wants to be a fun, irreverent space adventure. Can you combine those things? I guess. But it sure as hell ain’t easy.
Which brings us to one of the most ironic things about the DC Gunn experiment. When he first took over, one of his biggest promises was that he wasn’t going to make the mistake other superhero studios were making. He was going to make sure the scripts were GREAT before giving them a green light.
That sounds wonderful in theory. But in practice? It’s complicated. Because how do you know when a screenplay is great? What happens when you’ve spent two years developing a script, gone through eight drafts, followed all these interesting new directions, and you reach the end only to realize you’ve drifted away from the original movie that got you excited?
Do you start over? Do you throw away two years of work and go back to page one? Or do you convince yourself that your new “best of both worlds” version works? I actually think that if Gunn took a true risk with Supergirl and made the actual comic it was based on, which was much darker, that the movie would’ve done way better.
Which is something all of us writers battle with. Do we do that darker version that’s way riskier or do we do the safer version that’s been proven to work? Gunn ultimately leaned into the latter (“I know this world. It’s Guardians in the DC universe.”) and it was the wrong way to go. Conversely, I would argue that the risky dark direction Curry Barker took Obsession in, which could have easily had a stock setup with characters doing microfiche investigations in the second act to find out how to stop the curse, is exactly what could happen when you follow a riskier instinct.
The place you really get to study character is in TV. But this is something that these giant franchises still haven’t figured out. Sure, you get to study character more in a TV show. But everybody watching these shows expects more from them since they’re superheroes. So you always end up leaving audiences disappointed.
Sure, every once in a blood red moon you get a Penguin. But those shows are exceptions. After that initial two year honeymoon period when us Star Wars and superhero fans got to see our favorite world on TV, 9 out of every 10 of these shows have been terrible. I still have nightmares about the Jack Black and Lizzo Mandalorian episode.
I think the lesson here is to identify early on the exact movie you want to make. For example, Todd Phillips knew from second one that he wanted his Joker to be The King of Comedy. And every creative decision he made was aligned with that inspiration. He never deviated. It’s okay to follow a screenplay down unexpected paths. But if you’re getting too far away from your original vision, you want to make deathly sure that that’s the direction you want to go.
