Four leadership changes in 10 years is a shaky foundation for a shared universe. According to Nerdist’s report, James Gunn and Peter Safran are out at DC Studios, with former Marvel executive Jeremy Latcham replacing them. The more useful question isn’t whether another Marvel veteran can connect DC’s stories. It’s whether those connections need to be DC’s guiding principle at all.
The circumstances remain unclear. Some expected Gunn and Safran to leave after the Skydance/Warner Bros. merger, but reports in the preceding month suggested Skydance supported their ten-year plan and intended to keep them. Nerdist explicitly acknowledges that it doesn’t know with complete certainty what changed.
Latcham’s background doesn’t establish what he’ll do at DC. Still, Nerdist interprets the appointment as another sign of a nearly 50-year habit: chasing Marvel’s success. Its verdict is that the strategy has worked only once, in comics. That history suggests a better direction for the screen universe: let different characters carry different kinds of stories, rather than turn every project into another step toward the same crossover.
A shared world doesn’t need a single storytelling formula
Gunn and Safran’s approach offered an alternative to the MCU’s event-building structure. As Nerdist describes it, they deliberately created a setting where characters could overlap without every release feeling like a chapter in one enormous story. More precisely, it was a multiverse: an already-populated world of heroes, with each film or television series finding its own place in the existing timeline.
That distinction matters. A shared setting can provide context without becoming the main attraction. Television can take time to develop a character and a dramatic conflict, while films keep their own tones and entry points. Nerdist’s description of Lanterns as well-received supports the case for giving an individual series room to work, rather than judging it primarily by what it sets up next.
None of that means Gunn and Safran got everything right. Nerdist’s strongest criticism concerns priorities: after Superman’s success, the studio should have established clear plans for Batman and Wonder Woman. Four years into the pair’s tenure, the source argues, neither character had a sufficiently clear direction.
It makes a similar distinction about The People vs. Gorilla Grodd. The objection isn’t that the comedy series will necessarily be bad. It’s that an unusual gamble like that makes more sense after several successful movies, rather than just one. Creative variety and a coherent release strategy aren’t opposing goals.
The balance of projects for different audiences also deserved attention. Nerdist welcomes the adult-oriented direction of Peacemaker, Lanterns, and Clayface, but argues that DC should have delivered more than one family-friendly project across those four years. A universe with room for different tones should give families some variety, too.
Those are substantive criticisms, not reasons to scrap the entire approach. Given what it describes as the positive reception to Superman, Lanterns, and Clayface, Nerdist argues that ending Gunn and Safran’s tenure was premature. The task should have been to address the gaps without throwing away the storytelling model.
What DC’s history actually teaches
DC didn’t begin as a carefully coordinated universe. National Periodical Publications launched Superman to spectacular success in 1938, followed by Batman a year later, in 1939. In Nerdist’s historical account, the publisher waited 12 years after Superman’s debut to unite the two in a story. Shared mythology wasn’t the original plan.
Wonder Woman belonged to the Justice Society, an early move toward a shared world, but she didn’t regularly meet Clark and Bruce until the first Justice League story in 1960, nearly 20 years after her introduction. DC’s characters had developed distinct identities before regular interaction became the norm.
Marvel took a different approach. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the Fantastic Four in 1961, and the emerging Marvel universe made coexistence central to its appeal. Spider-Man, Thor, and the X-Men were early creations designed to inhabit that connected setting. At DC, outside titles such as Justice League of America and World’s Finest, Nerdist argues that the average reader had relatively little reason to think of the characters as sharing a universe.
When Marvel began substantially outselling DC in the 1970s and 1980s, imitation became attractive. DC rebooted its universe through the line-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985. In the source’s account, DC then hired major Marvel-associated creators, including Frank Miller, John Byrne, and Alan Moore, to reinvigorate its characters.
Nerdist credits that transformation with producing some of comics’ greatest stories, stronger connections between titles, and renewed sales. DC shook off its old-fashioned reputation. It wasn’t quite beating Marvel, but it was competitive again.
There’s a crucial qualification: the source also argues that DC eventually pushed imitation too far, sacrificing the individual voices its books needed. Its comics subsequently leaned back into a history of different tones for different characters. Borrowing a competitor’s useful ideas had helped; treating that competitor’s identity as the destination had not.
On screen, Warner Bros. repeatedly pursued the latter course. The success of the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises, followed by the MCU, made Marvel the model to chase. After The Avengers became a huge hit, the Man of Steel follow-up became a Batman team-up, accelerating toward a shared cinematic universe after just one movie.
Nerdist places comics writer Geoff Johns and Jon Berg’s arrival during Batman v Superman’s production and describes them as the leadership of DC Films. When the movie failed to launch the universe Warner Bros. wanted, both were removed from those roles by the end of 2017. The criticism here is of a studio demanding a lasting franchise, then rapidly replacing the people responsible when the launch disappointed.
Walter Hamada took over as studio head, inheriting the DCEU’s remnants, continuity, and casting and trying to shape them into a cohesive vision. In Nerdist’s assessment, Aquaman and Shazam! were the exceptions to an otherwise unsuccessful effort. Wonder Woman cameos and Henry Cavill’s Superman appearance in Black Adam attempted to reinforce the connections, using cameos and post-credits scenes in the Marvel Studios mold.
Hamada was out in 2022, when Warner Bros. hired Gunn and Safran, with Gunn’s appointment coming in late 2022. The new leadership largely started over, apart from the complicated Peacemaker connection. Nerdist views that reset more favorably because it wasn’t simply another attempt to reproduce the MCU’s world-building formula.
That leaves an important distinction between a personnel change and a creative mandate. Latcham’s involvement in the MCU’s rapid rise makes Nerdist suspect that Skydance wants another Marvel-style structure rather than an original approach, but that remains an interpretation, not a confirmed plan. The source counts two previous screen attempts at that strategy as failures and describes the repeated resets as exhausting and damaging to investment in DC’s stories.
DC’s characters have been iconic for almost a century; they shouldn’t have to keep chasing someone else’s success. The next leadership team has specific gaps to address: give Batman and Wonder Woman clear directions, provide more family-friendly projects, and preserve room for a series such as Lanterns to work on its own terms. A crossover should follow from stories worth connecting, not become the reason those stories exist.
