James Gunn says movie industry is dying because films are being made without finished scripts

James Gunn claims the movie industry is dying due to films being made without finished scripts.

The DC Studios boss explained in a new interview with Rolling Stone that the studio recently “killed a project” because they couldn’t get the script to the right place.

“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies,” Gunn said. “It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”

Speaking about his recently canned film, he added: “Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.

“And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so fucking good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so fucking good. Clayface, same thing. So fucking good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”

Not having a mandate from Warner Bros. to deliver a certain number of DC projects has also helped, according to Gunn and he believes Disney’s mandate to increase Marvel’s output during the launch of Disney+ had a negative impact.

“That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it killed them,” he said of Marvel. “We don’t have the mandate [at DC] to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality. We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible. Nothing goes before there’s a screenplay that I personally am happy with.”

Disney boss Bob Iger has since focused Marvel on quality rather than quantity with Thunderbolts* as “the first and best example” of this.

The first movie in Gunn’s DC Universe, Superman is set for release next month and only one other (Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow) has finished filming and is due for release in 2026. Clayface has also been slated for next year.

Elsewhere, he recently insisted that the sequel to The Batman is still “really important” to DC Studios, despite the evolution of a new universe of characters.

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