The toxic fandoms. The on-set dramas. The fact that there have only been about one and a half really good movies about Superman in the last 50 years. You have to wonder if James Gunn goes to bed most nights imagining how much better life would have been if he’d just kept to his corner of the MCU, making emotionally devastating big-screen excuses to paint Karen Gillan blue every couple of years.
But he didn’t. He took a job with DC Films, where every hero in a stable of characters has spent the last decade getting high-grit sandpaper crazy glued to their backstories. As part of that job, a cleansing fire is burning across the IP, selectively sparing a few performers while sending the rest back to central casting. Here’s a look at who got burnt.
Jason Momoa as Aquaman
It was a real Cinderella story when Jason Momoa brought his take on Aquaman to the screen, eschewing the traditional goofy fish talk in favor of attitude, pecs, and a seaside trailer park Rob Zombie aesthetic. Against all odds, his charisma and drawing power turned his solo movie, Aquaman, into the highest-grossing entry in the DCEU.
But a king’s reign can’t last forever, and Momoa is reportedly out as the undersea hero moving forward. Reports of Elon Musk-heavy shenanigans on the set of Aquaman 2, in addition to the underwhelming lead-up to the sequel’s universe-ending finale, seem to point to Warner Bros. keeping a weather eye on the horizon for a new King of Atlantis. Meanwhile, rumors putting Momoa in the motorcycle boots of DC’s main man Lobo remain speculative at best.
Ben Affleck as Batman
Anyone with so much as a tertiary interest in the DCEU knows that Ben Affleck is done playing Batman. Anyone who saw The Flash knows that he’s been done playing Batman since… well, since before he shot his scenes for The Flash. He’s tired. Leave him alone. Let him go kiss Jennifer Lopez and eat his Dunkin’ Donuts in peace.
Henry Cavill as Superman
Tenures in the DCEU didn’t come much more embattled than Henry Cavill’s. Through the good times and the bad, the mustaches and the crazy CGI philtrums, the scene in Justice League where he stared down Flash in slow motion, and the scenes in Justice League where he went goth for no reason, he was there. Imposing. Chesty. Uncharacteristically annoyed by people, considering how much time he spent saving them.
Despite the Black Adam tease and the implied promise of more to come, Cavill’s time as the Man of Steel is at an end – not with a bang, but with a super questionable CGI render during The Flash.
Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman
This one’s complicated. Even hardcore never-Snyderversers had to admit that Gal Gadot did as good a job playing Wonder Woman as was humanly possible. Even so, the results were all over the place – the iconic heroine’s second solo feature hit audiences with a wet thud, nobody walked away from Justice League sporting their best look, and the Diana cameos that followed — in an increasingly confused DCEU — felt gimmicky and cheap.
Further muddying the waters, a long list of mixed messages have hit the internet since the birth of the DCU made waves. According to Variety, Gadot is out. According to Gadot, Gadot is in. According to James Gunn, we’ll have to wait and see.
Ezra Miller as the Flash
Okay, so, for the cheap seats: If anyone is definitely out of the DC cinematic universe — like, more out than Ben Affleck which, again, is saying something — it’s Ezra Miller. Their last movie was a semi-historic flop that reviewed about as well as Wonder Woman 1984 after years of hype and an ever-expanding budget.
But it was doomed to begin with. The film had been in development hell for decades and DCEU was already drowning in the aftermath of Justice League, so it definitely didn’t help when Miller’s personal life added to the troubles and became a PR nightmare for Warner Bros. execs. It didn’t exactly shed a positive life on the film’s potential to sidestep disaster or the actor’s future in DC land.
George Clooney as Batman
What seemed like a promise of redemptive things to come at the end of The Flash turned out to be a goof – not just any goof, either. A third-draft goof. Despite a good-natured, why-not attitude from both Clooney and audiences in general, James Gunn has since confirmed that the Bruce Wayne of Batman and Robin is not the DCU’s Batman moving forward. Put another way, he’s been iced out.
