Ahead of his global press tour for Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” filmmaker and new DC Studios chief James Gunn has spoken some more about his Marvel legacy and upcoming DC projects.
In a lengthy sit down with Rolling Stone this week, Gunn confirms his upcoming “Superman: Legacy” film will be very different tonally from his work on ‘Guardians’, adding that he “learned so much from making these [Guardians] movies”.
He is leaving behind a legacy of one of the strongest runs of Marvel films. He says he wants Marvel to “keep making good movies,” but post-“Avengers: Endgame,” he thinks they have painted themselves into a storytelling corner that makes things difficult.
That ‘corner’ is ‘The Blip,’ when Thanos snapped half of the universe’s population out of existence, and then they reappeared suddenly five years later. Each work post-Endgame has had to deal with that in some form:
“I think it’s really hard in the wake of the Blip. There’s this worldwide, universe-wide event that happened. And in truth, everybody would be stark raving mad at this point. So it’s hard to write stories in the wake of that. Which is why the ‘Guardians’ movies have been easier, because they’re set outside of that a little bit.
The ending of “Endgame” posed a different challenge for Gunn as Endgame concluded with Thor joining the “Guardians of the Galaxy,” not something he was prepared for, and he was very thankful when Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” took over that burden:
To be completely honest, Thor was never going to be in this movie. Taika took a bullet for me. Because I was not going to have him in. I was just gonna start up and there’s no Thor.”
Gunn also talked about the growing issue of superhero fatigue, which some fans insist isn’t real, whilst others do. Gunn agrees with the latter but says it’s not the fault of the genre but rather of films that rely on spectacle over story:
“I think there is such a thing as superhero fatigue. I think it doesn’t have anything to do with superheroes. It has to do with the kind of stories that get to be told, and if you lose your eye on the ball, which is character. We love Superman. We love Batman. We love Iron Man. Because they’re these incredible characters that we have in our hearts. And if it becomes just a bunch of nonsense onscreen, it gets really boring.
I get fatigued by most spectacle films, by the grind of not having an emotionally grounded story. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not. If you don’t have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real.”
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is set to open in cinemas May 5th with “Superman: Legacy” is slotted for a July 11th 2025 release.
