DC Studios faces increasing pressure amid a corporate buyout and Supergirl's box office flop, contrasting sharply with Marvel's success. The studio has cancelled several projects, including Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Paradise Lost, alongside Gotham PD, Waller, Arkham Asylum, and The Authority film. However, a Jimmy Olsen series and a Deathstroke/Bane movie have been greenlit.

This comes despite recent successes like James Gunn's Superman and Matt Reeves' The Batman, which were well-received Delays for The Batman Part II and struggles with other productions add to the uncertainty. All eyes are now on the upcoming R-rated horror film Clayface, set in the DCU's Gotham, which has a modest budget and a Halloween release.

Its Overview & Context

Its success is crucial to rebound from Supergirl's dismal performance and provide much-needed momentum for the cinematic universe. DC Studios and WBD have reportedly passed on a Catwoman series and a Poison Ivy series, as well as seemingly pulling the plug on a Wonder Woman series titled Paradise Lost, while greenlighting a Jimmy Olsen series and a feature film that might team up villains Deathstroke and Bane, leaving many fans and Hollywood pundits scratching their heads.

With a controversial corporate buyout 2 billion-and-counting Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the same time DC’s own Supergirl faced box office kryptonite with just $126 million worldwide, the newly minted cinematic DC Universe faces increasing pressure and questions about its imminent future. James Gunn, DC Studios co-CEO alongside Peter Safran, wrote and directed last year’s Superman, and seemed to launch his theatrical shared universe successfully and to widespread enthusiasm from critics, fans, and general audiences.

Likewise, Matt Reeves’ rebooted franchise blockbuster The Batman back in 2022 proved the hangover from WB’s previous failed DCEU was short-lived as long as filmmakers delivered what audiences wanted and expected. Superman captured some of the same “breath of fresh air and family fun” sense we got when the MCU was still in its infancy, with nothing but potential and promise ahead, while The Batman recaptured the more adult and faux-realism sense we got from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy.

But Supergirl Overview & Context

But Supergirl’s box office flop, multiple delays in the production start and release of The Batman Part II, delays in getting several other projects into production (including a planned Batman and Robin DCU introduction), and a growing list of cancelled projects (besides Catwoman and Poison Ivy, the Gotham PD, Waller, and Arkham Asylum projects were cancelled, as was The Authority film) put at risk to overshadow the success of Superman and other projects like Peacemaker season two and the new Lanterns series that just began on HBO Max.

The animated Creature Commandos scored good reviews but only so-so viewership. And more than a few people are questioning the fact Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Paradise Lost are all nonstarters or shelved, while series about men including Booster Gold , Mister Terrific,Mister Miracle, and Superman’s sidekick Jimmy Olsen in The People vs.

Gorilla Grodd (if you hadn’t heard, the Jimmy Olsen show is a fictional investigative mockumentary about the trial of a superpower telepathic gorilla – which sounds fun and cool to me, but how mainstream viewers respond remains to be seen).

This is in addition to Peacemaker and Lanterns, both starring male lead heroes. So there is concern that after the initial willingness to go to a Supergirl film right after Superman, the studio seems to be focused on a lot of projects about men and moving away from projects led about women.

Of course, Clayface and Man of Tomorrow also unfortunately fit into that interpretation, as does the green lighting of a film reportedly around Bane and Deathstroke.

And Batman: Brave and the Bold. And Swamp Thing. Still, DC Studios is supposedly fast-tracking a Wonder Woman feature film (more on that in a moment), and the rumored Teen Titans project would presumably be an ensemble giving women characters equal roles/billing.

But overall the slate of projects has shifted toward heavily favoring superhero men while removing or declining superhero women. Some will argue it’s unfair to read it that way, but intentions and mind reading are less useful than actions and plans and outcomes.

More to the point, such things inevitably affect the buzz and narrative around a studio and its projects, in turn possibly affecting the success or failure.

Will any of this matter to the studio, be it existing leadership or potential new owners? We’ll find out soon enough. Clayface hits theaters later this year, and is set in the DCU’s version of Gotham.

This provides our first glimpse of Batman’s city in the shared superhero world. A horror movie The project, originally a standalone story, was folded into the new DCU and received an R-rating.

With an approximately $50 million budget and a Halloween-timed release in late October, there is a good chance the popularity of horror and lack of much branded competition against the Batman-centric release could all work in its favor.

If Clayface is good (and the pedigree of Flanagan-Amini-Watkins certainly inspires confidence) then it should be able to top Supergirl’s unfortunately dismal showing, but it remains to be seen whether it can ride the wave of horror over performance we saw with Obsession and Backrooms earlier this year, or play more modestly like Scream 7 and Scary Movie.

Next year’s Superman follow-up Man of Tomorrow hopes to avoid whatever lingering DC baggage and other factors derailed Supergirl. And there are plenty of reasons to think Man of Tomorrow can be a summer blockbuster that matches or surpasses Superman’s box office, just as there are obvious risks for the film.

However much or little the merger/non-merger situation weighs on DC Studios’ and WBD’s minds and plans, it’s bound to play a role in the film’s rollout, and it probably isn’t going unnoticed that Marvel is putting up multi-billion dollar results again after only a minor dip in popularity while DC is on its second attempt at building a sustainable popular shared universe.

A new controversy also threatened to drag down Man of Tomorrow when Nicholas Hoult, who plays Lex Luthor in Superman and the upcoming sequel, was cast in season two of HBO’s Harry Potter series. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has been a loud opponent of transgender rights, and recently created the J.K.

Rowling Women’s Fund, a fund that finances legal fights with the goal of excluding trans women from women’s spaces and even from certain public and work spaces. Her vocal and financial support for these anti-trans positions led to increasing boycotts against her work, not only from the public but also from businesses and even entertainment personnel who refuse to work on any adaptations of her work.

Hoult quickly withdrew from the Harry Potter series, claiming a scheduling conflict just a couple of weeks after word of his casting broke. He has already been replaced The point being, Hoult dodged a bullet Some good news is that Lanterns is enjoying higher viewership than Peacemaker and Penguin, which were hits in their own rights, and Marvel’s own blockbuster success could be a case of “rising tides lift all boats” if audiences are encouraged to get over any lingering boredom with certain (particularly DC) superhero cinema.

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And the trailers for Clayface look creepy and like the right kind of mix between body horror and supervillain storytelling, generating good buzz among comic fans and horror stans. It is nevertheless still hard to understand a lot of the decisions going on at WBD and DC Studios lately, though.

A Catwoman spinoff from the hit The Batman, following on the heels of the acclaimed and popular Penguin series, was a no-brainer as far as best ideas for expanding the Batman-world footprint, and there is ample top-shelf source material in the comics for adapting into a show about Catwoman.

The same is true of Arkham Asylum and Gotham PD, cancelled projects that should’ve been easy to green light and equally easy to wrap your head around and create (again, source material abounds). And through all of this, DC Studios has gone from early good will and promising conversations with the press and public which largely maintained control of the narrative, to an often messy and largely uncoordinated sense of promoting their plans and works.

There is no longer a sense that the studio is trying much to control narratives or consider press or public reactions and questions. Not that they should waste a lot of time being reactive to rumors, but there should be some attempt to get hold of the narrative and buzz in a more proactive and productive way than we’ve seen lately.

Maybe the hope is that keeping their heads down and just letting the released projects do their jobs without the studio getting in the way too much (especially with the Paramount merger conflict dominating headlines) is the best way to navigate the current turbulent times. Perhaps they also don’t want to be confronted with uncomfortable questions, including whether Gunn and Safran will stick around after 2027 if/when their contracts expire.

Despite statements from leadership at Paramount and anonymous sources insisting Gunn and Safran are staying at DCU after a Paramount merger, there are plenty of other sources and indications suggesting the opposite outcome could be more likely, including word from within WBD and DC Studios that, contrary to public talking points and plausible denials, many contracts aren’t being renewed due to either studio or certain individuals’ decisions to part ways.

Gunn might have agreed to extend his contract, but if so and if it’s an official signed deal we don’t know, nor for how long any such extension might be. That Ellison met with the filmmaker and his DC Studios co-CEO Safran during Man of Tomorrow’s filming in Atlanta suggests Paramount is at least attempting to maintain the impression they plan to stick to their promise of letting WBD operate with creative freedom.

We’ve heard the same promises endlessly prior to mergers, of course, including at WB, and inevitably most such promises quickly give way to a different reality. And a look at CBS for example doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in that regard.

Still, if Gunn did meet leadership and did agree to a contract extension, then hopefully there will be some public comments about that to help reduce some of the various negative buzz and fears circulating publicly and at the studios.

To that end, if Adria Arjona’s casting in Man of Tomorrow, previously reported as Maxima, is really a secret reboot of Wonder Woman (possibly taking some inspiration from the Absolute Wonder Woman comics?), it might be better to reveal that sooner than later, a point DC and Gunn are well aware of I’m sure. It would also help reduce those concerns about a lack of women-driven projects on the approved slate vs the cancelled/declined slate.

The fact the merger agreement prevents longterm contracts from being signed for certain DC projects without Paramount’s approval in the interim before the merger is finished, thus limiting longterm plans for the studio and for anyone attempting to work on the films and series, is realistically also an obstacle to at least some extent, no matter what anyone says to try to mitigate the fact.

If the merger fight and coming soon court dates push into summer of 2027, things get financially harder for Paramount and potentially franchise-killing for DC if they’re still restricted from signing longer deals or making longer plans til some unspecified future potential date. Is that possibly why DC is avoiding big moves or trying to answer a lot of questions at the moment, because they simply can’t do either while the merger limits them?

That could explain why we’re getting more movement on things like a Jimmy Olsen series and something involving Bane and Deathstroke, than major projects like Catwoman and the DCU’s Batman reboot. Regardless, The People vs.

Gorilla Grodd as a faux true-crime mockumentary But the bigger question is whether Gunn and Safran can overcome the simple fact DC has a shaky reputation at the box office for the past decade, audiences adopted a more finicky approach to selecting superhero fare worthy of their theatrical dollars, and box office results of the sort DC needs are vastly more likely for a known brand (especially ones that appeal to adults and kids alike).

In today’s climate, with so much at stake and with WBD’s imminent ownership in limbo, it’s fair to ask whether existing plans and slates deliver what the studio and IP need to succeed. If DC Studios capitalizes on Lanterns with a big push for Clayface that results in overperformance at the box office, then Man of Tomorrow’s inclusion of Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart/Green Lantern will surely get prominent marketing.

And if Adria Arjona turns out to be playing Wonder Woman, then that will also probably receive a lot of marketing attention, especially if it’s also revealed ahead of an announcement about a Wonder Woman reboot film. We’ll probably see the start of marketing next year for The Batman: Part II’s February 2028 release as well, and this combination of factors could all go far in increase mainstream anticipation and overshadowing tensions and negative pressures.

Undercutting that hope would be continued legal problems and challenges around the studio merger, a middling box office result for Clayface, delayed ability to make longterm plans due to Paramount’s demands ahead of the merger, and/or a Man of Tomorrow box office result that doesn’t demonstrate a convincing increase over Superman’s $618 million result next July.

Man of Tomorrow will open against the third weekend of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and the second weekend of Shrek 5, and then A Minecraft Movie Squared arrives in theaters just two weeks later. That doesn’t mean Superman’s sequel won’t have breathing room, but it only takes one or two of those other factors to pop up for audiences to get reminded of the DCEU and wind up taking a wait-and-see approach again.

This isn’t to doomsay, and there is as noted plenty of good that’s happened for DC Studios and plenty that can go well for them. But it’s also true that the initial good will earned from the leadership hirings and Superman has given way to a more mixed and uncertain vibe, for good reasons and also for admittedly pure uncertainty and rumor that feeds on such uncertainty.

Regardless, another failed attempt at a DC shared universe would almost certainly result in either licensing the characters to other studios for development (maybe in a partnership even, akin to Sony and Marvel Studios), or a return to the 2000s and 2010s when DC planned to give each character their own separate franchises without worrying about crossovers.

I’ve long shared my own suspicion is that a failure of the DCU will result in the studio going all-in to turn Reeves’ The Batman universe into its own mini-corner of films and spinoff series for Batman’s family of characters and villains. While I’m definitely not rooting for Gunn’s DCU to fail and have personally liked the projects so far (and been a personal longtime fan and defender of James Gunn, from loving and reviewing his films to unequivocally defending him against the short-term Marvel firing and malicious false allegations spread against him, for the record), if things don’t work out for one reason or another then I can’t say I oppose letting Reeves and likeminded filmmakers turn The Batman into a fully developed bat-world as a safety net option to keep DC cinema alive in a different direction.

In that case, we might wind up seeing Catwoman, Arkham Asylum, Gotham PD, and another season of Penguin after all.