The heroes DC needs and also wants

Much like a frozen computer, DC Studios needed someone to hit the restart button. And that’s exactly what DC co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran did yesterday, announcing their eight-to-ten-year vision for a cohesive, rebooted DC universe (DCU). It even has a name: Chapter One: Gods and Monsters.

↗️ Where it’s headed: According to Gunn, the last twelve years have been a mess for DC Studios. Always one step behind Marvel, the Warner Bros-backed studio rushed into its superhero team-up movie, Justice League, without first setting up each hero individually in their own film (like Marvel did before making The Avengers with Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor).

Highlights of the new slate include:

• Superman: Legacy (2025): A new origin story and “the start of the DCU,” per Safran.
• Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: A sci-fi epic film about a jaded girl from Krypton.
• Paradise Lost: A Game of Thrones style TV show about the all-female island Themyscira, Wonder Woman’s birth place.
• Waller : Starring Viola Davis, this HBOMax series starts where season one of John Cena’s Peacemaker ends.

🌎 Elsewhere in Elseworlds: The upcoming sequels for Joaqin Phoenix’s The Joker (2024), Robert Pattinson’s The Batman (2025), and a yet-to-be-named Black Superman Movie written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and produced by J.J. Abrams will all exist in DC’s Elseworlds, a home for one-off properties that are not part of the DCU.