While Marvel gears up for its Multiversal Saga finale with Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, James Gunn’s DCU finally seems to be inching toward its beginning. The DC Universe has been plagued by mismanagement and unplanned crossovers, resulting in a reboot with Gunn’s new and improved DCU, which begins with Superman.
Last year, Gunn announced with his co-chief Peter Safran the first chapter of the DCU, which would feature gods and monsters such as Superman, Supergirl, The Authority, and more. He compared the development of the franchise to Marvel and mentioned that it was being planned properly as opposed to Marvel’s more improvised approach to Phase 1.
James Gunn Says The DCU Is More Planned Than Early MCU
The word ‘planning’ and DC movies rarely go hand in hand as audiences have been privy to the number of bad management decisions taken by WB with regard to the DCU. Starting with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, the studio quickly pushed for an Avengers-esque crossover with Justice League.
After multiple failures, the DCEU was finally put to rest with last year’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and James Gunn’s DCU was announced. The filmmaker revealed a number of films, TV shows, and animated series that were in development as part of the DCU, including his directorial Superman.
Gunn also compared the development of the franchise to the early days of the MCU, which was reportedly built on the go. He said to Comic Book,
We are telling a big huge central story that is like Marvel Studios, except for I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel did from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we’re also creating a universe that is like Star Wars where there are different times and different places, different things, or like Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex.
He also mentioned that the first chapter will be telling one story and the DCU is introduced at a time when most of the superheroes have already been established.
James Gunn Is Right About The MCU Being Less Planned
When fans look back at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everything seems to be connected leading to the pivotal moment in Avengers: Endgame where all the heroes assemble to fight Thanos. The ‘Infinity Saga’ was the first of its kind at the time and every studio wanted to get in on the shared universe frenzy due to its success.
While many moments were planned in the MCU, the lead-up to Thanos being the big bad of the Infinity Saga and the Tesseract being the Space Stone was not planned. In fact, the first film of the MCU, Iron Man was reportedly largely improvised, including the famous closing lines by Robert Downey Jr. that makes a comeback in Endgame (via IndieWire).
Thanos was reportedly not set up to be the main villain of the franchise until The Avengers, where he is first introduced. In fact, Thanos is extremely inconsistent in his depictions in the MCU as he made appearances in Guardians of the Galaxy and Age of Ultron before he finally appeared in Infinity War.
Joss Whedon, who suggested Thanos to Feige, said that he did not know what to do with the character (via IGN). Hence, James Gunn’s statements about the MCU being relatively less planned are true and the DCU is doing things differently than its counterpart.
