In many ways, James Gunn‘s upcoming rebooted DCU has the benefit of coming at a time when the MCU is in its tired teenage years, as he can take a look at what’s working and what isn’t over at Marvel and do better. Case in point? We’re getting in-canon video games, something the MCU has never delivered in 15 years.
This is something that Gunn teased back when he first announced the DCU Chapter One slate a full year ago in January 2023, but now it’s been confirmed once more by Warner Bros. Games. In an interview with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad, Variety confirmed that certain games are currently in development that will be “canon additions to James Gunn and Peter Safran’s planned relaunch of the DC Universe.”
This is a whole new way of building out a cinematic universe from Gunn and Safran — the most Marvel has offered is a couple of middling movie tie-in games back in the early days of Phase One. However, while exciting, this tactic creates a huge question that fans have been quick to ask: how closely connected to the movies and TV shows of the DCU can these games really be?
The DC_Cinematic Reddit community certainly seems of the opinion that these DCU games will have to be “somewhat inconsequential to the overall narrative” because Warners “can’t expect people to take up video games to keep up with a movie[‘]s story.”
Remember we’ve got TV shows, both live-action and animated, coming from the DCU too. In order to avoid repeating Marvel’s mistakes, then, folks are expecting Gunn to serve up “self-contained emotional stories that can be watched or skipped at the viewer’s discretion.”
If people are complaining it’s too difficult to keep up with the MCU when we’re getting about three movies and three shows a year, imagine how they’d feel about having to play “40+ hour games” to keep up?
So how will the DCU games connect to Gunn’s overarching storyline? Many Redditors have floated a particularly convincing theory: that the games could be prequels, capitalizing on gaps in the franchise’s timeline and helping to enrich the backstories of the characters we see on screen. A great example would be a Batman prequel game, set before Bruce becoming a dad in The Brave and the Bold.
Others are concerned that the long gestation period of games means they could release well beyond any relevant movies. This is another way that making prequel games, or games “set in a particular moment” would be the way to go. An alternate option is to keep certain characters exclusively in the games. e.g. Green Arrow.
This is still just speculation, but DCU games that operate as prequels or sidequels to the movies would make a lot of sense. There’s no time frame on when to expect the first of these to appear either, but the fact things are already cooking behind the scenes is encouraging. Color us a fetching shade of intrigued.
