James Gunn Finally Addresses Henry Cavill’s Exit From Superman: “It Was Really Unfair”
It was weird in 2022 to see Henry Cavill announce he was back as Superman after Black Adam, and shocking to then see him retract the statement he made to his fans in an Instagram video mere weeks later. The eventual (at that point) DC Studios President James Gunn thought it was strange too, as he was stunned to hear the news while he was in the middle of closing his deal to relaunch everything under the management of Warner Bros. Discovery and its CEO, David Zaslav.
Gunn is sharing his reaction to the chaos and how he feels personally about Cavill, finally, after three years. “The day our deal closed, all of a sudden, they were announcing that Cavill was back. And I’m like, What is going on? We know what the plan is. The plan was to come in and do Superman. Yeah, so it was really unfair to him, and it was a total bummer,” Gunn said when he talked with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
Gunn and his partner at DC, Peter Safran, knew “the right thing to do” was to sit down with Cavill, whom Gunn called “the sweetest guy” and a “gentleman,” and break the news to him that his Insta update was unfortunately premature. “So Peter and I, the right thing to do was to sit down with him and talk to him, and we sat down, we talked to him. He was an absolute gentleman, a great guy about it,” Gunn recalled.
Before he wrote that he wouldn’t be the Man of Steel moving forward, Cavill made one request to Gunn and Safran: that he be the one to inform fans directly what the situation was. “He said, ‘The only thing I ask is that I’m able to reveal it myself, as opposed to it coming from you guys.’ And I’m like, That’s – he’s a class actor. He has been from the start,” Gunn explained.
The problems arose from internal conflicts at Warner Bros., where people were jockeying for positions they’d ultimately lose. “There was a vacuum at the time, and a lot of people were… [I’m] trying to be as diplomatic as possible…They were trying to take on what they wanted to do with DC, and were trying to force their way. It just was never a part of the equation for David Zaslav, who was the head of WBD,” Gunn added.
The players at WB responsible for the confusion may have included Black Adam star Dwayne Johnson, his team at Seven Bucks Productions, and former DC Films head Walter Hamada. Johnson consistently pushed himself and his superhero turn as a game-changer for DC. That didn’t happen. Black Adam was considered an average movie at best, and it flopped despite the numbers The Rock cooked up.
DC Studios is not developing anything with Cavill (or Black Adam for that matter), but James Gunn is leaving the door open for him. “I talked to him about it on that day. So yeah, no, I would, I would love to put Henry in something,” he said.
