Every so often, DC Comics gathers up its tangled continuities, sends a cosmic menace to eat them, and starts again with a clean slate and a fresh set of No. 1 issues. It has called this sort of thing a Crisis since 1985. Now its film arm is having one of its own, with no anti-matter wave required. On Monday 9 November, Skydance chief executive David Ellison announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran will step down as co-heads of DC Studios on 1 December. That is just over four years after Warner Bros. gave them the keys, and two years after their DC Universe opened for business with Creature Commandos.
Their replacement is Jeremy Latcham, who becomes president and chief creative officer and reports to Skydance’s film co-chairs, Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein. Latcham is a former Marvel Studios producer and executive, long described as one of Kevin Feige’s protégés, according to Forbes. So the House of Ideas has, in effect, supplied DC with its new chief creative. Any comics editor in 1985 would have bounced that plot twist back as too far-fetched. Gizmodo adds that his more recent producing work has been faith-based, including House of David, so DC may be about to learn a great deal about smiting.
The reason is the usual one: a new landlord. Skydance completed its roughly $110bn takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on 6 October, and new owners like to redraw the org chart. The official statements are warm, and Gunn’s own post presents the move as a mutual parting. The trades tell a sharper story. The Hollywood Reporter says the pair were told on Friday 6 November that plans had changed, partly over how much autonomy they had. Puck’s Matthew Belloni, quoted by Den of Geek, reports that “plans are already afoot to dismantle much of what Gunn and Safran had plotted out”. Skydance hasn’t said which plans, so treat the dismantling as reported rather than confirmed.
Some things are, for now, staying put. Gunn remains writer-director of Man of Tomorrow, still aimed at summer 2027. He and Safran also stay on as producers of The Batman Part II and The People vs. Gorilla Grodd. Gunn isn’t so much leaving the building as moving down from the penthouse to a very nice flat on the floor below, with the new tenant upstairs deciding what colour the hallways should be.
How did the Gunn era actually do? Superman made $618.7m worldwide in 2025, according to The Numbers. That’s a solid result, but not the billion-dollar sky-beam a studio dreams of. Supergirl took $126.5m this summer after a brutal second-weekend fall. Clayface, the body-horror gamble we rather liked the look of, has crept past $109m. On television, Lanterns wrapped its first season this week, and HBO still hasn’t said whether there’ll be a second. It’s a mixed hand, then. It isn’t the smoking wreckage of a Crisis, but it isn’t the clean sweep that would have made Gunn untouchable either.
Comics readers have seen all this before, on paper and many times over. Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–86) collapsed DC’s multiverse and killed off Supergirl and Barry Allen along the way. Zero Hour tidied up in 1994, Infinite Crisis did it again in 2005, and Flashpoint rebooted everything into the New 52 in 2011. Rebirth then spent 2016 quietly undoing a lot of that. At DC, continuity is less a timeline than a weather system. The films are catching up fast. Zack Snyder’s universe ran from Man of Steel in 2013 to The Flash in 2023, which was, fittingly, a multiverse film about trying to fix the past. Gunn’s DCU was the clean start after that. If Belloni is right, Latcham’s will be the third version of the DC film universe in about a decade. That’s still slower than the comics, but only just.
In the comics, heroes who vanish in a Crisis always come back eventually, usually with a new costume and a variant cover. Hollywood executives come back too, usually with a production deal and a reserved parking space. Gunn has Man of Tomorrow to finish. If anyone in this story knows how to turn a band of discarded misfits into a hit, it’s the man who made Guardians of the Galaxy. Meanwhile, somewhere in Burbank, a Monitor watches yet another slate being wiped and quietly updates his CV.
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