‘Why isn’t this guy running Marvel?’: Warner Bros. boss rubs it in Kevin Feige’s face after poaching James Gunn

The domino effect that led to James Gunn ending up as the co-CEO of DC Studios came hard and fast, and nobody could have predicted how things would end when Kevin Feige was ordered by Disney to pick up the phone, call the Guardians of the Galaxy director, and tell him his days as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were over.

That led him straight into the wide open and waiting arms of DC, and even though The Suicide Squad tanked at the box office, it segued into acclaimed spin-off series Peacemaker, which ultimately landed Gunn the top job alongside Peter Safran. It sounds like something ripped straight from a comic book, with Feige having accidentally created his own arch-nemesis.

Nobody could be happier about it than Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, though, who refused to contain his glee at the MoffettNathanson’s inaugural Technology, Media & Telecom Conference (per The Wrap), when he gushed over a creative mind “everybody wants to work with.”

“What we tried to do is get really great leadership. The philosophy of our company is we don’t want people to go to meetings, we want the people to do the work. So when I was meeting with James Gunn and he was writing Superman and he had written Guardians of the Galaxy – which is now a big hit for Marvel, which we’re happy about because Gunn wrote that movie and directed that movie – I’m looking at it and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why isn’t this guy running Marvel?’ He grew up his whole life with DC, his whole life with these Marvel characters and he knows every one of them, they’re his family. He just wrote Superman, which I read. This is the guy we want and everybody wants to work with him.”

If Zaslav wasn’t trying to come across as smug, he hasn’t done the best job, but you can understand why. Gunn is six-for-six when it comes to near-unanimously popular superhero stories, and Feige may yet come to rue the day he let the writer and director slip through his fingers should the DCU accomplish its ultimate goal and topple Marvel Studios from the top of the totem pole.