Everyone has their taste and opinion which I do sincerely respect, even when its different from mine. But its worth noting that James Gunn‘s TSS lost money for the studio—badly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottm...d-of-100-million-losers-club/?sh=342158c92e79
Parallel to this the Rock who was also vying for the gig Gunn got, despite his accountant (
) telling him Black Adam made money and somehow the standard 2.5x multiplier of the budget doesn’t apply to his film, also lost money with BA, although it almost broke even. And sure enough movies do continue to make money from other revenue streams. But when we talk about breaking even it’s in the context that ticket sales recoup the cost of making the film so that it
can make a healthy profit through those other streams. (What the pros have told me on Twitter is that the standard $100M marketing costs are absorbed by investors.)
Anyway, it definitely looked like DeLuca was making decisions for the DCU until Gunn and Safran were hired. It was in the direction of bringing the actors back and building out from the Snyderverse foundation. I honestly have no idea how to judge how good a job Mike DeLuca has done over the years. His IMDb listing of movies he has produced is all over the map.
Michael De Luca - IMDb
But right now I’d be trusting DeLuca more than Gunn. But again I obviously have a bias towards continuing with the current cast. So of course I’d see it that way!
I feel like it’s a bit disingenuous to say a movie that was among the first wave to really hit on the tail end of a global pandemic, with an extremely hard-R rating and that was a direct follow-up to a now notorious box office bomb (it made money, but, to this day, Ayer/WB’s Suicide Squad is pretty widely reviled) lost the studio money when it opened simultaneously on WB’s streaming platform and was one of HBO Max’s most streamed DC films. Not to mention both it and Peacemaker were huge critical successes (the latter of which also hitting record numbers for HBO max during its release).
I just feel like Gunn has a distinctive understanding of the nuance of the medium he’s working in that Snyder, frankly, doesn’t. Guardians has its own distinctive flavor comparative to something like TSS and it works. I feel like I’ve said it before, but take something like Starro the Conqueror. This is a character that is utterly ridiculous and campy. And that’s by design because it was created in a time when comic books were utterly ridiculous and campy. Yet, Gunn managed to create a creature that was equal parts terrifying Cronenberg body horror and imbued with genuine pathos and he did it, and this is where he won me over, while being unapologetic about the fact that this thing is an utterly ridiculous, campy, over the top giant starfish.
Like you said, mileage may vary and there have been many interpretations since, but I can’t dissociate The Fourth World and the New Gods from Kirby. I just can’t. They’re arguably the most elaborate, fascinating creations to come from the mind of a man that brought us Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and so many more and I would easily say they’re his most personal. It’s Jack in his most uninhibited, pure form and that’s precisely why I can’t get behind Snyder’s depiction of that world as a whole. Because it’s an operatic melodrama and a biblical epic all rolled into one…but it’s also a comic book. Not just any comic book, but an unapologetically campy, over the top comic book that sprung forth from the pages of titles like Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen and The Forever People.
We saw Snyder’s Fourth World and it had the melodrama and the epic mythology, but it falls apart without the self-awareness for me. Some people would prefer they play it straight. Me? I think it requires too much suspension of disbelief for me to look at a primary antagonist whose moniker is literally Darkseid without it being played with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Gunn’s sensibilities match that to a T. He can go dark, he can go light, he can embrace the fact that one of the heroes of this story is a master escape artist whose name is Scot Free and I think that’s why I’m so much more excited to see what he does with it.
I should clarify that I don’t believe everything
should be campy and, again, it all comes down to the characters. Matt Reeves’ Batman is arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever seen out of DC and it’s arguably the best depiction of comic Batman I’ve seen in live-action, in my opinion, but it would also be a terrible Superman movie to channel that same tone for that character. That’s what it feels like Snyder does and part of why I’m so critical of him is that I feel like he’s fundamentally misguided. The DNA of his DCEU is, by its very nature, an apologist’s take because all of his opinions, all of his conceptions and beliefs are rooted in the works of people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller. And, again, their seminal superhero work is rooted in that same apologism. Miller’s Batman is a quasi-fascistic ideologue he used to lampoon the jingoism and excesses of 1980s Reagan-era America and Watchmen is one, giant, scathing critique of how immature and ridiculous comic books are by casting familiar archetypes as impotent middle aged ornithologists and psychotic, unwashed hobos.
It’d be like if I said “I’m a huge Elvis fan and I want to make a movie about him,” but the only thing I knew about Elvis was Andy Kaufman’s impression he did on Johnny Carson. Might make for an interesting movie, but it’s not going to be the Elvis most people remember or even necessarily want to see and that’s a losing formula when you’re talking about billions of dollars worth of IP and a general public champing at the bit for a taste of something familiar.
