DCU Could Have Been Built By Grant Morrison Instead Of Tom King – But James Gunn Didn’t “Offer Anything To Write”
Somewhere across the multiverse exists a timeline where instead of CIA-agent-turned-DC-writer Tom King, James Gunn tapped acclaimed Final Crisis scribe Grant Morrison to help him build out the cinematic DCU – Sadly, ours is one where DC Studios “didn’t offer” him even a TV mini series to work on.
Their DC bibliography including such other seminal works as Animal Man Vol. 1, JLA Vol. 1, and All-Star Superman Vol. 1, Morrison revealed their unfortunate distance from Gunn’s new film franchise while answering fan questions as part of a recent Ask Me Anything Q&A session held with members of Reddit’s /r/DCcomics community.
Met with an inquiry as to their “thoughts on the state of non-comic superhero content today (eg. movies and tv shows) and is there any chance of you writing for Gunn’s DCU in the coming future?”, the Batman and Robin Vol. 1 writer answer in order, first opining, “There’s a lot of great material, some not so great. I loved Peacemaker and [Marvel Studios’] Eyes of Wakanda,” and then revealing “Like fools, the DCU didn’t offer me anything to write!”
“Even though I’ve created and developed three seasons of television in the last ten years!” he playfully exclaimed. “Imagine an Animal Man show! Or Seven Soldiers!”
(And for those curious, Morrison’s reference to his tenure on the Suicide Squad comes by way of his aforementioned Animal Man run, wherein he played with the book’s surreal, meta-textual nature to self-insert himself as The Writer, an omnipotent being who was able to manipulate reality with his words and cared little for the fact that he had essentially ruined the titular hero’s life.
Eventually blinking into non-existence at the end of Morrison’s time on Animal Man due to the book’s storytelling duties being handed over to Peter Milligan, The Writer would make one more appearance in John Ostrander and Kim Yale’s Suicide Squad Vol. 1 #58 (as well as a single-panel cameo in the main War of the Gods Vol. 1 event book via a flashback to this exact moment), wherein a sudden onset case of writer’s block causes him to meet his end at the hands of a raging werebeast.)
Now to be fair, Gunn is of course under no obligation to hire any specific talent to work on the DCU, nor has there been any sort of promise made to Morrison regarding an opportunity to do so.
And it’s not like Morrison would have to replace King outright (despite how much joy it would bring pretty much everyone), as he could easily just be given a separate project or serve as a late-addition to the overall planning team.
However, these facts do not change the objectively insane reality that rather than someone whose contributions to DC lore are some of the most well-received, endearing, and celebrated in the entire canon, the publisher’s cinematic future is instead being handed over to a guy who claimed that an unmodified Catwoman could outthink and outspeed the entirety of the Flash family, turned Supergirl into a reclusive, emotionally closed off, high-fantasy-styled space adventurer, whose run on Omega Men Vol. 3 basically boils down to ‘CIA enhanced interrogation apologia’, and who has openly bragged about both planning and helping spearhead the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq.
This bafflement is only exacerbated by the fact that Gunn explicitly cited All-Star Superman as a direct inspiration for Superman and plans to have Damian Wayne, originally created for Morrison’s run on Batman Vol. 1, serve as the DCU’s resident Robin – If DC Studios is just going to use their work as a blueprint, why not just go straight to source?
Imagine being DC, or Gunn, or even King himself, and thinking “Who needs Doom Patrol, or 52, or The Multiversity when you can have Heroes in Crisis and ‘Bat? Cat. Cat? Bat. Bat! Cat?’, am I right?”
Actual, hypercrisis-level insanity. The Gentry are winning.
While there of course always exists the possibility for Morrison to be brought on board to the DCU sometime in the future, the writer revealed elsewhere in the thread that he currently has “no major projects planned at DC,” adding “But that’s not to say I might not do something else there.”
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