Said it before...I'm not getting the adulation for Gunn.
There's a small subset of developers/producers where a built in established audience will follow them.
Ryan Murphy is completely bankable. He's a cash cow for FX. He's extremely reliable. He has a stable of actors and crew that like to work with him and they produce reliable baseline shows and product. Shonda Rhimes is another. Taylor Sheridan. Dick Wolf for Law And Order. Joss Whedon. James Cameron. George Lucas. Oprah Winfrey. Tucker Carlson. Rachel Maddow. Simon Cowell. Howard Stern. Joe Rogan.
The critical reasons that Zack Snyder got hired in the first place are many of the SAME reasons that James Gunn is getting hired to replace him.
I'm not saying Gunn will have the impact of a Ryan Murphy across multiple shows/themes or get the momentum that Sheridan has gotten in the past few years. But David Zaslav wants to find out.
Ryan Murphy wasn't locked in with Glee, he was locked during Nip/Tuck. Someone saw a guy on the rise and locked him early before he blew up. I can see the same here with Gunn. They don't want present day Kevin Feige. They want their version of Feige just before Iron Man 1 came out.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. X-Men got Jennifer Lawrence on the way up. Then she resented the role, the makeup and kept mailing it in. The end result was lackluster. But the principle behind the decision makes good business sense.
The difference being Gunn is much further along than Ryan Murphy in a relative sense, from a potential standpoint, and inside a bigger stakes situation.
This isn't just the DCEU, this is all of WB as a whole. When CNN Plus tanked, this was all somewhat predictable. There was going to be some heavy bloodletting, fair or not. The DCEU was not going to spared from taking some hits as well in that carnage. A massive exodus happened across the board. Of course there were going to be some casualties.
There's a saying my uncle taught me as kid. This was right after he told me to never wear a fanny pack for any reason.
He said -
"Bad timing is the ultimate enemy of what's seen as fair"