James Gunn continues to be as open as he can when discussing the goings-on of the film process. The writer/director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films has been known to engage directly with fans on social media and talks equally as transparently as he can in press interviews. Recently, Gunn pleaded with fans to give Matt Reeves a break on the awaited sequel to The Batman, saying, “Let him [Reeves] do his thing, man. The Batman Part II is not canceled. That’s the other thing I hear all the time — that Batman Part II is canceled. It’s not canceled. We don’t have a script. Matt’s slow. Let him take his time. Let him do what he’s doing.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, in Gunn’s latest interview with Rolling Stone, the filmmaker, who climbed through the ranks to become DC Studios’ co-chief, revealed what he thinks is the reason that the movie industry is dying. Gunn would explain,
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 would make it a priority at DC to not secure a release date for a film before the script was finished. He even admitted that they had “just killed a project” for that very reason. The Superman director continued, “Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.” Then, he adds, “And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so fucking good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so fucking good. Clayface, same thing. So fucking good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
Being a veteran at Marvel Studios, Gunn admitted that Disney’s mandate to increase Marvel’s output amid the launch of Disney+ really hurt their brand. “That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it killed them,” Gunn explained. On Threads, fans took Gunn’s words of “it killed them” to mean that the Studio died after Avengers: Endgame. So, Gunn once again directly engaged with fans to clarify what he meant. Gunn expounded, “To be clear – & as IS clear in the context of the interview- I didn’t say ‘it killed them’ like they’re over but they were screwed by the situation they had no control over. They’re on the other side of that now, which is good. The sacrifice-everything-for-streaming craze killed many good things by forcing a demand for ‘content’ that couldn’t possibly be met, putting movies on TV before they had a proper theatrical run & much more. The insanity has died down & balanced out everywhere. Thank God.”
