James Gunn has a “number-one reason” why he believes the “movie industry is dying.”
The filmmaker and co-head of DC Studios recently told Rolling Stone that a lot of the bad movies being released are due to production dates being set before scripts are completely finished.
“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good,” Gunn said. “The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”
When Gunn took over at the helm of DC Studios with Peter Safran, he emphasized that superhero films under his guidance would not go into production until scripts were finalized. He even admitted that they “just killed a project” due to that very reason.
“Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go,” the Superman director said. “The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”
Gunn added, “And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so fucking good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so fucking good. Clayface, same thing. So fucking good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
Not having a mandate from Warner Bros. to deliver a certain number of DC projects has also helped Gunn, as the Guardians of the Galaxy director believes Disney’s previous mandate to increase Marvel films and TV shows “killed them.” Disney CEO Bob Iger has since refocused Marvel on quality over quantity.
“We have to treat every project as if we’re lucky,” Gunn explained. “We don’t have the mandate [at DC Studios] to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality. We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible. Nothing goes before there’s a screenplay that I personally am happy with.”