James Gunn: fired by Marvel, handed DC, and still betting it all on Superman

James Gunn

Photo: James Gunn / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 5, 1966 St. Louis, Missouri
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Superman
Awards	Saturn Award

The question that has followed James Gunn through the last several years is not whether he can make a good superhero film — three consecutive ones proved that. It is whether someone with his specific instincts, a B-movie sensibility trained on Lloyd Kaufman’s aesthetic of gleeful transgression, can make decisions at executive scale. Superman, released in the summer of 2025, was the first real answer. Not the cleanest answer, not the most profitable by the standards of the pre-COVID franchise era, but a $618 million answer that gave him enough runway to keep going.

James Francis Gunn Jr. was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Catholic family that gave him a Jesuit education and very little of the pop culture chaos he would later spend his career producing. He briefly played in a rock band — the Icons released one album and went nowhere — and eventually enrolled at Saint Louis University before earning a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University in 1995. It was at Columbia that he began working at Troma Entertainment, the low-budget horror studio run by Lloyd Kaufman, and where his real education as a filmmaker began.

At Troma, Gunn co-wrote Tromeo and Juliet in 1996 — a Shakespeare adaptation whose title communicates the studio’s sensibility without further explanation. What he absorbed there was not so much technique as philosophy: that genre constraint and genuine feeling are not opposites, and that an audience will follow sincerity into strange places if the filmmaker does not blink. He left Troma and spent the early 2000s as a screenwriter, writing Scooby-Doo in 2002 and the Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004. Both sold. Neither felt like his native language.

His directorial debut, Slither, arrived in 2006 and demonstrated a filmmaker who understood the formal grammar of genre while being visibly in on the joke. His second feature, Super, pushed further — Rainn Wilson as a self-appointed vigilante in a hand-sewn costume, one of the more honest interrogations of superhero mythology that decade, precisely because Gunn refused to make it comfortable. Both films underperformed commercially. Both built a cult following that gave him the credibility to survive what came next.

When Marvel hired him to write and direct Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, the industry consensus was that the assignment was a liability. Nobody knew those characters. The trailer was mocked before it was praised. The film opened to $94 million domestically and went on to gross $773 million worldwide — and the more significant number was the Rotten Tomatoes score, 91%, which signaled that the critical establishment had absorbed a sincere comedy about a raccoon and a sentient tree without embarrassment. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 in 2017 pushed deeper into family dysfunction as thematic engine, grossing $863 million. By the time of the third film, Gunn had built the closest thing to an authorial franchise in a genre not built for authors.

In July 2018, Disney fired him. Conservative commentators had surfaced decade-old tweets containing offensive jokes that Gunn himself publicly acknowledged were indefensible and that he had long since moved away from. Disney’s response was swift. The Guardians cast — Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel — published a collective open letter of support. Warner Bros., watching an available filmmaker with a proven franchise record, hired him to write and direct The Suicide Squad. In March 2019, Disney reversed course and rehired him for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. For roughly eighteen months he held contracts with both studios simultaneously — a circumstance the industry had no framework for and has not quite developed one since. The question it raised, and that the cancellation discourse has not answered, is what firing means when the creative labor market is tight enough that the competition immediately absorbs the dismissed party.

The Suicide Squad, released in 2021 against a COVID-reduced theatrical landscape, grossed $168 million worldwide — commercially modest but critically considered one of the sharpest superhero films of the year. Peacemaker, the HBO Max series following John Cena‘s character from that film, debuted in 2022 and confirmed that there was an audience for superhero storytelling that was formally adventurous and uncomfortable in ways the Marvel template tended to sand away.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, released in May 2023, became his most emotionally direct film — a story about trauma, found family, and the ethics of scientific exploitation that managed to make audiences cry about a genetically modified raccoon. It grossed $845 million worldwide, received an A on CinemaScore, and represented his deliberate farewell to the franchise. By that point he had already accepted a different assignment: in October 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that he and producer Peter Safran would serve as co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios, effective the following month.

Running a studio requires different skills than directing one film every two years, and the early DC Studios tenure produced its share of strategic turbulence — cancelled projects, renegotiated talent deals, an entire creative universe that had to be simultaneously preserved and reset. Creature Commandos, his adult animated series for HBO Max, debuted in December 2024. Peacemaker‘s second season aired through the summer of 2025. And then Superman: David Corenswet in the suit, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. It opened July 11, 2025, to $122 million domestic and ultimately $618 million worldwide. An 82% Rotten Tomatoes score. An A- CinemaScore. Gunn called the result an “enormous relief.” The reviews noted its sincerity, its color, its willingness to take the character at face value rather than ironize him into abstraction.

His next directorial project, Man of Tomorrow, is scheduled for 2027, bringing the same cast against new adversaries including Brainiac. The DC Studios contract has been extended through Spring 2027. His brother Sean Gunn, who played Kraglin across the Guardians trilogy and appears in Superman, remains a fixture of his productions. Jennifer Holland, whom he married in September 2022 in Aspen, Colorado, plays Emilia Harcourt across the DC properties. The next several years will determine whether the instincts that made the Guardians franchise the most coherent authorial vision in the superhero genre can be transferred to the administrative problem of running an entire studio. So far, he has declined to simplify it by choosing one role over the other.

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Tags: American cinema, James Gunn, DC Studios, Guardians of the Galaxy, Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad

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