The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe has changed. Days after Dwayne Johnson’s DC film Black Adam struck theaters in October 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it hired The Suicide Squad writer-director James Gunn and Aquaman and Shazam! series producer Peter Safran to run the newly formed DC Studios as co-chairmen and co-CEOs, replacing DC Films and president Walter Hamada. The news came as Johnson and Gunn were each planning their own separate takes on Superman, with Johnson pitching a Black Adam vs. Superman movie with Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel set to return to the DCEU — something Gunn only learned the very same day he closed the deal to reboot Superman and the DCU.
“The day our deal closed, all of a sudden, they were announcing that Henry was back,” Gunn said during a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And I’m like, ‘What is going on? We know what the plan is. The plan was to come in and do Superman.’ So it was really unfair to [Cavill], it was a total bummer.”
He continued, “But it was a vacuum in [DC] at the time, and a lot of people were… I’m trying to be diplomatic as possible. [Other people] wanted to take on what they wanted to do at DC and were trying to force their way in, and it was just never part of the equation for [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO] David Zaslav.”
Gunn intimated that one of those people was Johnson. (In 2022, it was reported that the Black Adam actor-producer circumvented Hamada’s decision to nix Cavill’s Superman cameo.) “Dwayne went around everyone, which didn’t sit well,” an insider told Variety months after Gunn and Safran assumed control of DC Studios, with the outlet reporting that Johnson, along with fellow Black Adam producers Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, and Beau Flynn, “made a play for control of DC” during that power vacuum.
That same year, The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker actress Jennifer Holland (who is also Gunn’s wife) reprised her role as Emilia Harcourt in Black Adam and then 2023’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods, appearing in the latter in a post-credits scene alongside Steve Agee’s John Economos. Although both characters exist in the newly rebooted DCU — the Gunn-helmed interconnected universe that so far consists of Creature Commandos, Superman, and Peacemaker season 2, where Holland and Agee star alongside John Cena — the DC boss confirmed that both Black Adam and the Shazam sequel are not canon.
“They’re not canon! I hate it,” Gunn told Den of Geek in a new interview pegged to the new season of his HBO Max series, which returns August 21. Gunn, who will launch a Peacemaker podcast he’ll co-host with Holland and Agee to clarify “what’s canon and what’s not in the DCU,” reaffirmed that nothing from the old DCEU (the DC Extended Universe) is canon unless those events are specifically mentioned to have happened.
“There are certain things from the old universe that we refer to in Peacemaker season 2, but until then, they’re not canon,” Gunn explained. “Almost everything from season 1 is canon, but season 2 will explain everything that is or is not canon.”
That includes the season-ending Justice League cameo, which featured appearances by Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s Flash alongside stand-in body doubles for Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. Gunn revealed last year that the JL “don’t exist yet.”
As for a Black Adam 2, Johnson said in 2023 that a sequel was axed due to a “vortex of new leadership.” He said at the time “there were so many changes in leadership” at DC and Black Adam was “one of those movies that got caught in that web of new leadership.”
“Any time you have a company, but especially that size and magnitude that’s a publicly traded company, and you have all those changes in leadership, you have people coming in who creatively, [and] fiscally, are gonna make decisions that you may not agree with philosophically,” Johnson said of his superhero vehicle, which failed to cross $400 million at the global box office in 2022. The Zachary Levi-fronted Shazam! sequel bombed, taking in just $134 million worldwide when it hit theaters within a short stretch of fellow flops Blue Beetle and The Flash in 2023.
Meanwhile, Gunn’s Superman, the first DC Studios film, has already grossed $416 million since soaring into theaters July 11, and is on track for a box office gross totaling at least $600 million worldwide.
Peacemaker season 2 premieres August 21 on HBO Max.
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