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DC Cinematic Universe ( The James Gunn era)

Gunn has been busy on Threads, including revealing that none of the other DC heroes in Superman: Legacy are mere cameos, but still insisting it's a Superman film and not a collection of costumed goober crowd scenes.
Q: No more [cast members] please we want a superman movie lol
Gunn: What single-protagonist movie doesn’t have more than ten speaking roles? There will be more.

Q: Yeah I get that mr Gunn I'm talking about keeping the focus on superman it starting to looking like a DC super hero roster movie
All the OG superman movies had one super hero and worked just saying
Gunn: We aren’t those movies. We’re us.

Q: Right. Whenever somebody argues otherwise, show them a pic of the OPPENHEIMER cast.
Gunn: Yep! So true. Very much a single protagonist film with a lot more characters than we have.

Q: I think what they're saying is please no more superhero cameos setting up the new DC cinematic universe (in what you've repeatedly said is a standalone Superman movie).
Gunn: None of these roles is cameos.
What Gunn doesn't seem to be getting here (or is pretending not to get) is that additional costumed heroes are perceived very differently in this kind of movie than more generic supporting cast members. From the outside, it appears to be threatening to become some kind of "team" movie, which is something many Superman fans don't want. Oh well, at least he's well aware of the concerns at this point, and that he will have to overcome people's trepidations and prove the choice was justified. Still hopeful that he can.

The only other real news nugget I see among his responses is that he "wanted a Lex who was contemporaries with Superman" (in response to someone saying he should have cast Michael Rosenbaum instead of Hoult).

Gunn also reposted a new graphic of the announced cast to date, endorsing it as "accurate":

GBFwssvW0AAczWd.jpg
 
What Gunn doesn't seem to be getting here (or is pretending not to get) is that additional costumed heroes are perceived very differently in this kind of movie than more generic supporting cast members.

I don't think it's a matter of not getting it, it's a matter of not wanting to get too specific in his answers and give the story away prematurely. Ultimately, the answer to all these questions will be, and should be, the movie itself.
 
I don't think it's a matter of not getting it, it's a matter of not wanting to get too specific in his answers and give the story away prematurely. Ultimately, the answer to all these questions will be, and should be, the movie itself.
Fair enough. But, boy oh boy, Gunn sure does continue to field questions about it. More responses on the matter have gone up on his Threads account since my earlier post. (I'm not going to quote them all again.) And these are selected from among bajillions of questions on all kinds of subjects to which he doesn't choose to respond. He pretty clearly feels this is a concern he needs to address/defend.

And he continues to act like he thinks the issue is the number of secondary characters, not the number of secondary superheroes. If he had announced casting for Cat Grant, Steve Lombard, Ron Troupe, and Bibbo Bibbowski, instead of Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Mr. Terrific, and Metamorpho, I guarantee you not a peep of objection would have been raised.
 
And he continues to act like he thinks the issue is the number of secondary characters, not the number of secondary superheroes. If he had announced casting for Cat Grant, Steve Lombard, Ron Troupe, and Bibbo Bibbowski, instead of Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Mr. Terrific, and Metamorpho, I guarantee you not a peep of objection would have been raised.

Except I think that might be the point. This is going to be a world where superheroes are a commonplace part of the population, not an exceptional class. Movie audiences are used to superheroes being treated as exceptional characters who are necessarily the focus of the story, but in comics they're often just part of the landscape.

Like in, say, the current She-Hulk run by Rainbow Rowell, featuring a running subplot where Jen has channeled Titania's need to pick fights with her by organizing a super-fight club so they can beat each other up without crimes being committed, and the Thing and Luke Cage just drop by wanting to be included in the fights, but otherwise don't play a major role in the story. Meanwhie, Jen's law firm is representing superheroes and villains as their clients, so all sorts of super-people are in the background ranging from story-relevant roles to one-panel cameos. And Jen's dating an obscure Avengers member who's back from the dead, and her social circle consists largely of people like the Wasp and Hellcat dropping by for book club or getting together to eat cake. The superheroes are just there, part of the story, in the same way civilians would be.

Okay, that example is a bit unusual even by comics standards, but still, it shows that the roles superheroes play in other heroes' stories don't necessarily have to be as fellow members of a super-team. They have their own everyday lives that intersect with each other in ways beside the crimefighting.

And whether there are objections from the audience before the movie has come out is, frankly, of zero concern to me at all. Uninformed opinions are just empty noise. They're people's reactions to what they imagine and fear, not to anything objectively real, so they're utterly meaningless and not worth wasting our attention on.
 
Anyone who holds up "OG Superman movies" as a standard to aspire to or even as a frame of reference needs to calm down.
 
I don't see why people are getting so worked up over there being other superheroes in the movie. Just because there are other superheroes in the movie doesn't mean that the movie won't still be focused on Superman, they can be still be supporting characters the same as unpowered characters like Lois or Jimmy.
 
The clue’s in the name. What’s Superman’s legacy? Inspiring all these subsequent heroes.

It’s not rocket surgery.
 
The clue’s in the name. What’s Superman’s legacy? Inspiring all these subsequent heroes.

It’s not rocket surgery.
Good theory, but it's apparently not the case. Gunn has indicated that we are joining the narrative at a point where numerous superheroes already exist.
 
Those aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive concepts
Okay, I see your point -- you don't necessarily mean "inspiring" in the sense of inspiring their creation, but inspiring them going forward. And that could be. There has been a lot of speculation that these other heroes may be presented as overly violent or otherwise misguided in their methods, and that Superman shows them a better way. I personally hope that's not the case -- it seems pretty facile, and threatens to play into the whole "Saint Superman" thing that some loudly decry -- but I guess we'll see.
 
Gunn has been busy on Threads, including revealing that none of the other DC heroes in Superman: Legacy are mere cameos, but still insisting it's a Superman film and not a collection of costumed goober crowd scenes.

What Gunn doesn't seem to be getting here (or is pretending not to get) is that additional costumed heroes are perceived very differently in this kind of movie than more generic supporting cast members. From the outside, it appears to be threatening to become some kind of "team" movie, which is something many Superman fans don't want. Oh well, at least he's well aware of the concerns at this point, and that he will have to overcome people's trepidations and prove the choice was justified. Still hopeful that he can.

The only other real news nugget I see among his responses is that he "wanted a Lex who was contemporaries with Superman" (in response to someone saying he should have cast Michael Rosenbaum instead of Hoult).

Gunn also reposted a new graphic of the announced cast to date, endorsing it as "accurate":

GBFwssvW0AAczWd.jpg

I like the casting.
 
The appearances of Mr. Terrific, Hawkgirl, Guy Gardner, Metamorpho and Maxwell Lord feel like Gunn is laying the foundation for a Justice League/Society type movie.
 
FWIW, Gunn swears up, down, backwards, forwards, and sideways that the other superheroes are not included to set up any future projects, but only to serve the needs of this specific movie. Again, only time will tell if that's true.
Okay, I see your point -- you don't necessarily mean "inspiring" in the sense of inspiring their creation, but inspiring them going forward. And that could be. There has been a lot of speculation that these other heroes may be presented as overly violent or otherwise misguided in their methods, and that Superman shows them a better way. I personally hope that's not the case -- it seems pretty facile, and threatens to play into the whole "Saint Superman" thing that some loudly decry -- but I guess we'll see.
Following from these thoughts, I just wanted to add that it's a bad idea to approach a Superman movie as some kind of thesis statement. (Not to say that Gunn is necessarily doing that.) He's a character, not a term paper. Just spin an exciting, funny, romantic tale about this corn-fed guy with awesome power, a heart of gold, and a bottomless desire to help, and his love story with a big-city reporter who simultaneously intimidates, dazzles, challenges, and inspires him, and you're golden.
 
I get the feeling that Gunn is trying to cash in as much as he can before Superman Legacy comes out. Besides running DC he has hired himself as writer for several projects and has hired himself as Director on Superman. All of which is a separate paycheck.
 
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