James Gunn Shakes Up DCU Plans, Teases A Decade-Long Saga

James Gunn just laid out where the DCU is headed, and the short version is: the map changed a bit, the destination did not. He talked through it on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, and there are some surprisingly inside-baseball details in here about how the sausage is getting made.

The plan (and how it evolved)

When Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios, Gunn says he had an early roadmap for the first wave of shows and where the bigger story would go. That original outline was run past the top brass: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Pictures co-chairs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, and HBO chief Casey Bloys. Then Gunn brought in a writers room he actually trusted, they cracked a fuller arc, and from there… reality happened. Some pieces shifted for all the usual reasons, but the spine of the overarching story stayed put.

"I am not gonna greenlight anything without having a screenplay that I love."

That philosophy is one of the reasons the plan is both deliberate and flexible. Certain projects that were part of the early vision still need to click into place; others have moved around. Gunn describes it like pinpoints on a timeline that stay the same while the lines between them can be redrawn.

The decade question

Gunn pegs the master arc at roughly a decade, maybe a little less. That tracks with the 8–10 year window DC floated back when Chapter One: Gods and Monsters was announced. If the current confirmed slate looks different from what was pitched back then, that is by design. Gunn keeps calling it a big-picture plan you can pivot within without breaking the spine.

Where it shows up onscreen

Here is how Gunn frames the rollout of the core story beats he is talking about, plus what DC says is actually next:

• It starts in Superman, then carries into Peacemaker, then flows into the next Superman movie, and continues through the following films after that.
• Right now, Peacemaker season 2 is dropping weekly.
• On the theatrical side, Supergirl is up next.
• Lanterns is in the works.
• So is Superman: Man of Tomorrow. Yes, that title has history as a past animated project; here it is being used as an in-development DCU piece tied to the larger plan Gunn is describing.

The connective tissue

This part is easy to miss but matters: Gunn is building one long story that threads through both TV and film. He is adamant about only moving forward when the scripts are there, which practically guarantees delays and reshuffles, but it also explains why the plan can survive those reshuffles. The destination markers are locked; the route to get between them can change without the whole thing collapsing.

It is a rare bit of clarity for a franchise that has had plenty of chaos over the years. And, honestly, hearing the chain-of-command sign-offs and the writers-room approach is pretty inside baseball for a podcast chat. But it tells you the important part: the DCU is playing the long game, and the long game is already underway.