James Gunn calls out latest DC Studios The Batman reporting as "entirely untrue"
James Gunn's new job co-running DC Studios appears to include playing "Rumor Whac-A-Mole" on an increasingly regular basis
Hollywood executives, as a rule, aren’t the most communicative of people. It’s one of the things that makes James Gunn, so recently installed in his new position as co-head of Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Studios, refreshing: Gunn’s a guy who’s always prided himself on transparency, talking plainly, often on social media, with fans about his stances on his films, characters, comic book opinions, etc.
Said transparency does, though, appear to be contributing in part to the ongoing weirdness surrounding DC at the moment, as Gunn has once again spoken up to call out recent reporting on the studio’s plans—credited to “A well-placed source” by Variety—that suggested that Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s version of Batman might soon be incorporated into the wider DC movie universe. It’s “entirely untrue,” in Gunn’s phrasing.
Which is all well and good—that’d be a pretty wild tweak to make, to our minds—but it’s also not the first back-and-forth that Gunn and his studio (which he now co-runs with Aquaman producer Peter Safran) have had over the last few weeks. It comes, after all, in the wake of the confusion surrounding who did or did not walk away from the table in the conversation around Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 3, which saw multiple version of the story of the film’s abandonment leak out over the course of a week. There’s clearly some kind of communication issue at or around DC Studios at the moment; someone is telling vetted industry publications like Variety and THR this stuff, forcing Gunn to quash the rumors and suggestions back down on what’s becoming a weirdly regular basis.
All of this is, of course, amplified mightily by the confusion and interest surrounding Gunn’s takeover at DC; the movie-going public has never gotten to watch, in basically real-time, as a bunch of movie execs try to steer a multi-billion-dollar film franchise in an entirely new direction, like some sort of big ol’ boat (that may or may not have Henry Cavill in it). So questions about what Gunn and Safran are planning are obviously rampant right now. For now, Variety has updated its story to log Gunn’s disavowal of the Bat-Pats rumors.