James Gunn Says DC Won’t Repeat the Fatal Mistake That "Killed" Marvel

James Gunn says the movie industry is dying — not because of streaming services or people being too lazy to go to theaters, but because of a major script problem. He believes this problem killed Marvel, too.

“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay,” Gunn said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

One of Gunn’s key rules at DC is that no film can begin production without a completed script. The DC co-CEO revealed that the studio recently canceled a project that had been approved and was ready to begin production, but “the screenplay wasn’t ready.”

Importantly: Gunn claimed that even Marvel knows exactly what went wrong.

“[Longtime Marvel executive producer] Louis [D’Esposito] said that privately to me. I don’t even know if it’s really their fault,” Gunn said, referring to how Marvel “puts out too much stuff” under a corporate mandate.

The Superman director is confident that DC isn’t going to fall victim to the same mistake.

“We don’t have the mandate to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality. We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible,” he added.

Marvel’s Very First Movie Was Made With an Unfinished Script

A look back: it’s not like the problem of unfinished scripts is a thing of the recent years.

Back in 2022, Jeff Bridges told Vanity Fair in an interview that Iron Man, the very movie that basically kickstarted the MCU in 2008, was also made without a completed script.

“It was so lucky to have Jon on there and [Robert] Downey, because both of them are terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn’t like the original script and we thought, ‘Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.’ Then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s got to be this and that.’ And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say. We’d spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines and exploring how we were going to do it,” Bridges said.

Fans Can’t Wrap Their Heads Around Gunn’s Revelations

The fact that big studios can put a movie in production without knowing exactly how it ends has fans scratching their heads.

“I can't f**king believe it took THIS LONG for somebody in power to say "we finish scripts before we shoot anything." An objectively BONKERS thing to do and studios have just done it forever. If you want to maximize your chances of making your money back and then some, have a finished great script,” said Redditor AlexCora.

However, fans loved Gunn’s honesty and openness to new risks and challenges.

“Admitting that they might put out some not-so-good things is refreshingly honest,” noted Redditor ConnerBartle.

Gunn’s first big DC endeavor, Superman, will premiere in the US on July 11.