Once I absorbed the shock of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s exit from DC Studios – I’d literally just interviewed Safran about DC’s future film and TV slate two weeks ago – I started researching Jeremy Latcham, the incoming President and Chief Creative Officer of DC Studios.
I’m sure my path must have crossed with Latcham’s in the past either during his stint at Marvel Studios or when he served as a producer on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves or Bad Times at the El Royale.
Who is New DC Studios Boss Jeremy Latcham?
Latcham started at Marvel in 2004 when Avi Arad still ran the show and Kevin Feige was a top deputy. Latcham eventually rose to become Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Production and Development.
He served as an associate producer on Iron Man, a co-producer on Iron Man 2, and an executive producer on The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. That 2017 film was Latcham’s final Marvel project, when he left for an overall production deal with 20th Century Studios.
Gunn and Latcham worked together on Guardians of the Galaxy. Indeed, by Gunn’s own admission, Latcham was the creative exec who hired him to write and direct his first MCU film. Watch this resurfaced clip below of Gunn and Latcham on the red carpet for Guardians recounting how they began working together.
Also: It’s worth pointing out that Jeremy Latcham was one of the guys that hired James Gunn for Guardians of the Galaxy. In fact, he was the one that interviewed him for the job. So yes, I do think he still wants him as a creative in DC Studios. https://t.co/X7YyWucfSO
— Lee Pace should be Batman. (@WayneG1939) November 9, 2026
But it’s the work that Latcham has done after Marvel and Hasbro (where he once had an overall deal to produce movies based on their IP) that has now gained some attention to his hiring on social media, including Latcham’s appearance on the Bible Bros podcast earlier this year.
A proud Christian, Latcham recalled on that show how his faith shaped his values, the movies he wants to make, and the stories he finds most worth telling. These insights may shed some light on what to expect from his stewardship of DC Studios, which is now owned by David Ellison’s Skydance.
While Ellison’s personal political views are somewhat murky – he claims to have supported both Republican and Democrat candidates in the past – his business dealings with the current Trump Administration in pushing through the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, and his locking horns with Democratic state attorneys general who had hoped to block the deal, certainly made him appear aligned with Trump’s particular brand of conservatism.
Wouldn’t Ellison then want someone at the helm of DC Studios whose perceived values and politics align more closely with his own and who would produce DC content that’s reflective of those values? Gunn’s anti-Trump views are well known and as much as he tried to couch his Superman film as being about embracing hope and compassion, it’s almost impossible not to view that movie as a repudiation of the meanness and cruelty that have marked the current administration’s policies.
More DC Studios News:
Which Project Could Get Batgirl’d?No Season 2 for LanternsIs the DC Cinematic Universe Cursed?Skydance Was Unhappy With DCU Box OfficeDCU’s Batman Was Dead Before It Was BornWhy Man of Tomorrow Could be 2027’s The Flash
Latcham and Gunn’s Religious Beliefs
One might think Latcham, an exec who has worked for the faith-based and family entertainment company Wonder Project, might want to bring a more conservative or family-first leaning to the DCU than the more progressive bent that’s marked Gunn’s projects. That’s entirely possible but it’s not like religion or faith in general was absent from Gunn’s films. While Gunn has previously said he is “anti-religion” in the organized sense, he elaborated on his feelings about religion in an interview back in 2014:
“My personal take is that there is a role for spirituality in some people’s lives and I think that a belief in God can be a good thing for a great amount of people,” said Gunn. “I do not like any sort of faith or religion that is based on exclusivity, meaning any sort of religion that says you’re damned to hell or you’re not going to be saved because you don’t believe the same thing I do. I believe faith and spiritual belief is a very, very personal thing and if I started applying what I believe to everybody else it would be unfair to everybody’s individuality and I really hate that.”
How Latcham’s Faith Helped Inform the Early MCU
For the incoming DC Studios boss, Latcham told the Bible Bros how he helped contribute to Marvel’s Phase 1-2 films, including Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, by pushing that they spoke to people like his grandparents by telling redemptive stories with heart.
“All those Marvel movies I worked on, the way the company worked and was structured, I was really the guy creatively on the ground with the filmmaker guiding the development of the movie and the story. And so for me, it was always looking for redemption in these characters and looking for ways for connection so that you could take something from the movie and bring it into your life,” Latcham told the podcast.
“I’ve never been interested in just making an action movie,” he continues. “To me, it’s like the reason a movie would stick around with you is because of the characters and because you see them overcoming flaws and becoming better people and redeeming themselves, or growing or learning or something. And so that was super important on all those films, was just to instill a sense of heart. And so it wasn’t instilling faith, per se, but it was instilling redemptive qualities into these characters and seeing the growth that they could have and seeing how that could be relatable to your own life.”
A member of the Made for Texas advisory council, Latcham cited Guardians of the Galaxy’s Peter Quill as an example of a character seeking redemption. He said that although Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t “overtly a faith story or anything” that “you see this guy learn and grow so much in this beautiful journey, from a guy who can’t take his mother’s hand as she’s dying at the beginning of the story to uniting his friends and holding their hands and finding community and putting his faith in people and growing together in a beautiful way. It’s something nice there. … My thing is always heart, humor, spectacle, in that order. That’s my thing that I say over and over 1000 times on a movie, people make fun of me for, because I’m always like, ‘Do we care? Is there heart? Are we laughing along the way?’ And obviously you need spectacle because it’s a movie, but heart’s really what I care about when we’re developing a film.”
Latcham also explained how he pushed for a redemptive arc to be “a guiding light” in the first Iron Man because he wanted the film to appeal to Midwestern viewers like his grandparents:
“I remember my grandmother called me when Iron Man 1 came out and she said, ‘Our pastor on Sunday preached about the movie and he doesn’t even know that you worked on it. The restorative redemption wove its way into his sermon and Iron Man was the proxy for redemption that he used as trying to make yourself a better person.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, man.’ All the time that [Iron Man director Jon] Favreau would joke and be like, ‘Oh, Jeremy’s Meemaw and Peepaw wouldn’t like this.’ It ended up [that] the movie connected and was for Meemaw and Peepaw at the end of the day. … And that was a guiding light for how we made stuff in those early days of Marvel, was wanting to connect and feel redemptive and feel hopeful and feel like it had something to say that was meaningful.”
What Latcham’s Views Suggest About the Future of DC Studios
That emphasis on redemptive story arcs with a hopeful bent isn’t at odds with what James Gunn had already brought to the DCU. After all, no one in the DCU has a bigger redemption arc than Chris Smith, aka Peacemaker. But that’s also where one could expect to see Jeremy Latcham’s DCU wildly differing from Gunn’s. I wouldn’t expect to see any more full frontal male nudity, orgies, drug use or even excessive profanity in the DCU that Latcham will oversee.
Elsewhere in the Bible Bros podcast, Latcham recalled how, when he was at the Wonder Project, the goal was to produce movies that embrace patriotism and pro-America messaging: “The core message there was faith in God, obviously, faith in country, faith in family, faith in fathers. Faith in all these institutions that we believe in in America: the idea of America, the idea of a democratic, free, capitalist society. All these things that we take for granted, that people are losing faith in on the daily like, ‘How do we make these things that we believe in front and center in these movies?’”
If Latcham doesn’t completely reboot the DCU it would seem likely that future DC projects might bring back “the American way” to the Superman character’s motto. Latcham, who was on that podcast to promote his Nate Bargatze-led film The Breadwinner, expressed his hope and desire to see the revival of genres like romantic comedies and G-rated live-action films, while also repeatedly expressing his disappointment in so much R-rated horror fare the industry has produced. (I guess fans shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for a Clayface sequel despite the R-rated horror film being a modest box office success for DC Studios.)
Latcham told the podcasters that his post-Breadwinner goal was to “build a slate of movies that are really diverse because I want to have healthy options when I go to the movie theater to see anything. I want to be able to see any different type of movie. I find it really frustrating when it’s the same thing over and over again at the box office. So I’m trying to build movies that are all redemptive, that all have heart, that all give us a little something to think about, to do better, to grow, to learn, to try to make ourselves better in this project of being a human.”
Perhaps that’s the same goal he will bring to DC Studios. Maybe there is room within the DCU tent for G-rated fare or even some PG-rated superhero rom com. We’ll just have to wait and see what Jeremy Latcham has in store when he assumes command of DC Studios on December 1.
