James Gunn Killed Greenlit DCU Movie for a Smart Reason

DC Studios CEO James Gunn opened up about the studio’s creative process behind upcoming DC Universe projects. This comes after the theatrical debut of Superman, which serves as the first movie in Gunn’s DCU franchise. At the moment, it currently holds a Certified Fresh rating of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 404 reviews.

James Gunn explains why he canceled a recent DCU movie

During a recent interview with Ideastream Public Media, Gunn stressed how important it is to have completed screenplays in order to maintain a movie or show’s quality before moving on to production. He believes that the reason why some movies turned out bad is due to writers not getting enough time to write their scripts because studios have already set up release dates for projects that don’t even have finished scripts yet.

“One of the problems is that when they’re writing these screenplays that aren’t finished, you’re getting the first act. And you’re often in a first act that’s great, but you can’t write a first act that doesn’t relate to the last act,” Gunn said. “So if the last act isn’t written, movies don’t work like that. Plots don’t work like that. They’re a piece of – you know, it’s like a clock, you know, where everything has to fit and work together. And I’ve seen it happen again and again, and it irritates the hell out of me. And as much as I go out there and keep, you know, talking about it, they still keep doing it, and it’s crazy. But I’ll never do it. I will never do it.”

In addition, Gunn also discussed the time when he had to cancel one of their greenlit DCU movie because the screenplay wasn’t getting better with each draft. If he pushed through with the project, it would have just made the director and writer look bad.

“I just stopped — you know, we had a screenplay that — you know, a movie that was greenlit. We went about. We got second draft and third draft, and it just wasn’t changing. It wasn’t getting better. It was staying in the same place. And I said, we can’t make this film. We can’t. It’s not good. We know it’s not good,” he recalled. “Just because we have a good director attached and a good screenwriter, it doesn’t mean the script is working. It’s — everyone is going to be upset at the end of this. It’s going to come out, the movie’s not going to be good. Director’s going to look bad, screenwriter’s going to look bad and we’re going to look bad. So I don’t want to have this. We’re not going to make the movie. And so we killed it.”

(Source: Ideastream Public Media)

Originally reported by Maggie Dela Paz on SuperHeroHype.

Source: Comingsoon.net