James Gunn Is Out at DC Studios After the Warner Bros. Merger — and Nobody Saw This One Coming

Peter Safran and James Gunn

Everybody knew the Warner Bros. merger would bring major changes. The film bosses were already gone. The streaming services were being bundled. The cost cuts were coming. But nobody — not the fans, not the trades, and apparently not even the men themselves — saw this one coming: James Gunn and Peter Safran are out as the heads of DC Studios.

Skydance announced the shake-up on Monday, November 9, 2026, just over a month after its roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closed on October 6. Gunn and Safran, who had run DC Studios since November 2022, will step down on December 1. Their replacement is Jeremy Latcham, a former Marvel Studios producer and senior vice president, who takes over as president and chief creative officer. A Marvel man is now running DC. If that sentence sounds strange to you, it sounded strange to everyone else, too.

The Assurances That Did Not Survive the Month

What makes this stunning is not just the change — it is how recently the opposite was promised. After the merger closed, Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison went out of his way to assure the public and shareholders that Gunn and Safran would keep their jobs. In October, the pair were formally included in the new company's leadership structure. As recently as November 1, Gunn confirmed that he and Safran would report directly to Skydance leadership and said the new owners were supportive of their plans for the DC Universe.

Then, on Friday, November 6, Ellison and Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz showed up at Gunn and Safran's offices on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank and told them in person: the plans had changed. The previous assurances were off. Three days later, the announcement was public.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the shuffle had been in the works since early fall — before the merger even closed. Skydance film chief Josh Greenstein had already reached out to Latcham, and the new owners were already talking to replacements while Gunn and Safran believed they had survived. The reporting structure was the fault line: Gunn and Safran's contracts said they reported directly to the top — first to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who hired them, and then to Ellison. Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, the co-chairs of the Skydance Motion Picture Group, wanted all movie production under themselves. Greenstein and Goldberg won. Latcham will report to them when he takes over on December 1.

Rebuilding DC with a Rebooted Universe

Gunn and Safran took over DC Studios in the fall of 2022, hired by Zaslav to rebuild the superhero brand after a run of high-profile failures, including the 2017 Justice League. Gunn, who had already directed The Suicide Squad for the old universe, was the creative face of the reboot. Safran, a veteran of The Conjuring horror franchise, was the producing partner. Together, they launched a single shared universe — the DCU — meant to finally rival Marvel's.

The results were real but uneven. Superman opened in the summer of 2025 and gave the new universe a foundation. Creature Commandos and Peacemaker season 2 found their audiences. Clayface, which opened just as the merger closed, passed $100 million worldwide on a $44 million budget. But four years, Gunn himself has now said, was "trying, to say the least." In a farewell message posted to Threads, he wrote that he would miss the people and miss being the co-caretaker of the characters, "but I'm also incredibly relieved and excited to get back to pure filmmaking." That is the statement of a man who is not pretending the last four years were easy.

He is not leaving DC entirely. Gunn has finished filming the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, which is in post-production for a July 9, 2027 release, with David Corenswet returning as Superman, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and Lars Eidinger as Brainiac. Gunn and Safran will return to full-time creative work and remain involved as producers — and Gunn says he has been engaged on another DC project he is writing, with more to come. He had already wrapped Man of Tomorrow and was writing a third Superman movie when the Friday visit came.

The Irony of the Replacement

Here is the detail that makes this story almost too perfect: Jeremy Latcham is the Marvel executive who championed hiring James Gunn to direct Guardians of the Galaxy — the movie that made Gunn an A-list director. Latcham was part of the founding team behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe and worked closely on its formative projects, including The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. Now he replaces the man he helped launch.

It is a strange, almost poetic symmetry, and it is also a signal. Skydance is not hiring a DC loyalist to steady the ship. It is hiring a Marvel architect to run DC the Marvel way — interconnected, centrally managed, and reporting up through the studio's film chiefs rather than straight to the top. The new boss knows the playbook. He helped write it. The question is whether the playbook works when the characters are different, the audience is different, and the studio has already rebooted twice in a decade.

What Happens to the DC Universe Now?

The biggest films on DC's slate are The Batman Part II and Man of Tomorrow. Man of Tomorrow is finished filming and locked for next summer. The Batman Part II, the other pillar of the slate, is still on track as far as anyone knows. But everything else — the television projects, the animation slate, the long-term plan for the DCU — is now in the hands of a new chief with a new boss, a new reporting structure, and a mandate from owners who have already shown they will change their minds about assurances they gave in public.

Skydance is not done reshaping, either. The same day it announced the DC shake-up, the company detailed plans for $6 billion in cost savings from the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition and said it would launch a streaming bundle of HBO Max and Paramount+ early next year. The merger left Skydance with $87 billion in gross debt. Warner Bros. film bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy were already ousted after the deal closed. Gunn and Safran are the latest, and the biggest, names on that list — and the pattern is clear. Nobody's job is safe just because somebody said it was.

For DC fans, the feeling is familiar and exhausting: another reboot of the reboot, another new boss, another promise that this time the plan will hold. Gunn built a universe in four years. Latcham now inherits it — the films, the shows, the characters, and the audience that has watched this studio change direction more times than it can count. Whether he keeps what Gunn built or starts over will define DC for the next decade.

The first test will watch the Man of Tomorrow, the movie Gunn made, opens under the boss who replaced him.