James Gunn sheds light on why ‘movies are suffering’

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ director and co-CEO of ‘DC Studios’, James Gunn, recently shed light on the current status of the ‘DC Universe’ and his plans for its future. Gunn promised that things are going to be different going forward, after a tumultuous decade for the franchise, which saw a string of commercial disappointments and a regime change. In an interview with ‘Collider’, Gunn also spoke about the state of the film industry in general and offered his two cents on why ‘movies are suffering’.

Gunn plans on not aping the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ and instead, creating a franchise in which films and shows can stand independently without requiring the audience to have done homework beforehand. The biggest change that he insists on is that no scripts will be greenlit unless they make the cut in terms of quality. Gunn talked about his early days in Hollywood when scripts were ‘valued’.

He told ‘Collider’, “‘Scooby Doo’ got greenlit because people liked the script. You may like the movie; you may not like the movie, but it got green-lit because people like the script. People are green-lighting projects because an IP has to be out on a certain date, which means that the screenplays are worse and movies are suffering for it. TV is thriving because there’s so much good television out there and movies are just really suffering and it’s not because people don’t want to go to the box office. It’s not because people don’t care about that format anymore. It’s because the movies aren’t as good and it all comes down to the writing. To have a director out there shooting his heart out and trying his best with something that doesn’t have a third act. It’s just self-sabotage and we got to quit doing it as an industry.”

On ‘Threads’, when a user asked if he was going to follow the lead of Kevin Fiege (president of ‘Marvel Studios’), Gunn answered, “It won’t be exactly like ‘Marvel’ because nothing is greenlit before we have a finished script.”