What the future holds for DC Studios in a post-James Gunn and Peter Safran world is anyone’s guess at the moment. Perhaps we’ll know more once incoming DC Studios President and Chief Creative Officer Jeremy Latcham assumes command December 1, but I assume there may not be any new film or TV slates officially announced until after the New Year.
The biggest question, obviously, is whether the new Skydance-operated regime will reboot Gunn’s DCU, with some reports claiming that might be the case. Skydance is $87 billion in debt and looking to cut costs and maximize profits across the board. Post-merger, Skydance now has all of the Paramount intellectual property at their disposal to exploit as well as the entire Warner Bros. library.
So how might such a debt-riddled corporation start producing films that seem like safer commercial bets than, say, a Clayface movie (which was a modest success for DC Studios)? They will obviously lean on their most recognizable, bestselling brands (hi, Batman!), but Skydance now owning the IP of both studios opens the door to them possibly doing crossover films one day.
That was what many fans thought might happen with Disney and Fox properties after those studios merged, but audiences are only getting their first real taste of that crossover potential with Avengers: Doomsday. That acquisition was completed seven years ago, and I can’t see Skydance wanting to wait that long to jumpstart audience interest in all the new toys they have to play with.
Mind you, I’m not advocating for crossover films between Warner Bros. and Paramount IP, but it does seem like something someone at Skydance has to at least consider. A live-action Batman meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie might sound ridiculous, but those two properties have already done animated film and comic book crossovers, so maybe it’s not as crazy as it sounds.
Of course, Paramount has yet to even make a proper Transformers/G.I. Joe crossover movie and they’ve had those properties in-house for ages. There would certainly be a lot of legal entanglements still involved in any Warners/Paramount crossover project despite Skydance owning both studios – producers’ existing deals, credits, etc. – but when you owe $87 billion, maybe kicking around huge event movie ideas like a franchise crossover might not be too crazy to consider.
Granted, such crossovers would open the door to Hollywood essentially making fan fic films, but they’re high-concept and marketable to mass audiences. A studio exec could simply type a prompt into AI and have it spit out a list of potential crossover movies, which I feel certain someone at Skydance must have already done.
Are we looking at a future where, say, the Justice League teams with the Autobots to stop Lex Luthor and the Decepticons? Where the Terminator is sent into the Matrix or the Green Lantern Corps teams with Starfleet to thwart some multiversal threat? Could the IMF team from Mission: Impossible recruit members of the Suicide Squad? Freddy Krueger vs. Ghostface? The Conjuring investigators visit a household from Paranormal Activity? Aquaman meets SpongeBob? Krypto pals around with Paw Patrol? What if that mysterious evil from Smile found its way to Gotham City and drew the attention of a certain Clown Prince of Crime?
I think you get the idea of where this could go. Crossovers, of course, are nothing new. The Universal Monsters were doing that decades ago. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? famously teamed Looney Tunes and Disney characters. More recently, The LEGO Movie franchise saw Superman, Lando Calrissian and Gandalf all share the screen, while the Ready Player One movie enlisted nearly every major pop culture IP under the sun.
The likelihood of Warners-Paramount crossover films happening seems more possible now that so much IP is owned by the same giant media company. Perhaps such intermingling between these IPs will never happen (or not to the scale I’ve suggested here) … or maybe I just foretold a future where crossover slop and $300 million glorified fan fic films are the next big thing. Maybe we’re looking at a cinematic phase of gods and monsters after all, just not the ones we expected.
