The Marvel veteran will run DC under Skydance as Gunn returns to filmmaking, admitting his four years in charge were ‘trying.’
James Gunn has been the public face of DC for four years. Now he is giving up the corner office. Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios, Skydance announced Monday, and Marvel veteran Jeremy Latcham will take over as president and chief creative officer of the comic book studio.
The shakeup is a surprise. Gunn and Safran were named to David Ellison‘s leadership team just last month, when Paramount Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and renamed the combined company Skydance. They will now return to full-time creative work, and Gunn remains attached as writer and director of next summer’s Superman: Man of Tomorrow.
Gunn was unusually candid about the decision. “What only the closest people to me have known over the past four years is my time at DC Studios has been trying, to say the least,” he wrote on social media, adding that he disliked the “at-times corporate nature of the job.”
That honesty explains a lot. Gunn is a filmmaker first, a writer-director who made his name on Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad, and running a studio meant spending his days on budgets, slates and corporate politics rather than on set. Under the new arrangement he gets to do what he does best, with someone else absorbing the pressure of the boardroom.
Gunn and Safran were hired in 2022 by former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav to build a true rival to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Their results were mixed. Superman relaunched the franchise in 2025 with $618 million worldwide, a solid start. This summer’s Supergirl was a costly misfire, grossing $126 million on a reported $170 million budget. This fall’s R-rated Clayface has earned about $109 million worldwide on a $44 million budget, a modest but profitable outing for a film we called the most confident thing DC has made in years. On television, the pair expanded the universe with Peacemaker, Creature Commandos and Lanterns for HBO Max.
Latcham is a fascinating choice, and a telling one. He spent 13 years at Marvel Studios, joining in 2004 and rising to senior vice president of production and development, where he worked alongside Kevin Feige to build the MCU from the ground up. He was an associate producer on Iron Man, co-produced Iron Man 2 and executive produced The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy. After leaving Marvel in 2017, he launched Latcham Pictures and produced Bad Times at the El Royale and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
In other words, Skydance has hired the closest thing it could find to a Feige of its own. Latcham will oversee DC’s film, television and animation slate and report to Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, the co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group. That reporting line matters. Gunn and Safran had operated with unusual independence. Latcham will be part of a larger studio structure, a sign that Ellison wants DC run more like a division and less like an autonomous kingdom.
The bigger question is what this means for the DC Universe Gunn built. Gunn and Safran mapped out a connected slate, and their exit comes with several major projects in motion: Man of Tomorrow next summer, Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II with Robert Pattinson in 2028, and the 2027 series The People v. Gorilla Grodd, with Skyler Gisondo reprising his role as Jimmy Olsen. Gunn’s involvement in Superman suggests the core of his vision will survive, at least for now. How much of the wider plan Latcham keeps is the story to watch.
The move is also the clearest signal yet of how Ellison intends to run the newly merged studio. In just over a month since closing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal, Skydance has announced a Paramount+ and HBO Max bundle and now reshaped the leadership of its most valuable franchise. As we argued in our open letter to Ellison, the merger’s success will depend on whether the company protects the creative brands that made both studios worth buying. DC is now the first real test.
