Hard to believe, but we didn’t always live in the era when James Gunn wasn’t the co-head of DC Studios, responsible for bringing the DCU into the modern era. Turns out, Gunn didn’t initially want the job. Wild.
Gunn appeared on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum — which, by the way, what kind of title is “Inside of You”? I’m just saying what we’re all thinking. …Anyway, Rosenbaum wanted to get to the bottom of why Gunn took the job, when he seemed to be a guy who only wanted to make movies.
“It’s such a daunting task to make a movie let alone a successful movie,” he said. “And then … Guardians one is a huge success and Guardians 2 is a huge success, Suicide Squad, Peacemaker and all these things, and then someone over at DC says ‘hey, we want you to run the studio.'”
What Rosenbaum asked next got a pretty surprising answer from Gunn. “Did you think about saying no?” Gunn said:
“When it first came up I was like ‘ehh,’” he said. “And it didn’t come up, nobody came to me and said, ‘Do you want to run DC?’ But it came to me very early in the process [the question of] ‘would this be something you were interested in?’ This is very early.”
His first reaction, he said, was “Nah, I don’t think so.” Why? Because it was just Gunn, not Gunn plus Peter Safran (the co-head of the studio). “What eventually made it appealing to me was doing it with Peter.” Gunn said Safran “has been my manager since I first moved to L.A., back when he was the president of Brillstein Gray.”
Gunn revealed the two were “very close friends” who hang out together and vacation with their families together. They get along so well that they’ve only gotten into “one or two arguments over the past 25 years.” They work together “exceptionally well.”
“I respect his opinion completely on many things and he respects my opinion about creative stuff.” So when the offer came as a package deal, with “Peter sort of managing everything and working as a producer” and Gunn in more of a director role, he went for it.
“That became suddenly an opportunity to do something that had never been done before,” he said. “To create the biggest story ever told across film, television, gaming and more, and to really create a cohesive DC Universe.”
Things are looking pretty good over at DC all of a sudden.