Jeremy Latcham is set to take over DC Studios on December 1, stepping into a slate that James Gunn and Peter Safran left unfinished when they exited earlier in the week. The former Marvel executive and producer of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will be the person deciding what moves first, what stalls again and what never gets off the page.
That matters now because the shift is not happening in a vacuum. Gunn and Safran spent two years trying to rebuild DC around a single vision, and Latcham is inheriting the part of it that was never fully completed, just as Warner Bros' new owners are pressing for a business that stays in the black.
The scale of the handoff is easier to see in the projects still hanging in the balance. Gunn and Safran's Gods and Monsters plan, first unveiled in January 2023, was only realized at 40% before they left. Superman and Supergirl made it under that banner, as did Lanterns and Creature Commandos, but Paradise Lost, Booster Gold and The Authority all stalled after early pitches. A few years ago, James Mangold was circling Swamp Thing; now he is making his Paramount+ series Copland a priority and working on a motocross heist screenplay that reunites him with Timothée Chalamet for the film studio.
The tighter problem is that Gunn and Safran did not open the floodgates on live-action features. They declined to greenlight anything beyond what was already in production before the run-up to the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, leaving only The Batman Part II, Man of Tomorrow and The Dynamic Duo in motion. Gunn has also teased that he is writing a screenplay in the DC universe after Man of Tomorrow, but that greenlight will belong to Team Latcham, not the men who shaped the original plan.
Most of what is left behind is on the TV side, and that is where the contradiction sits. Many of the animated projects are already in the works, but several still lack a streaming or network home and others do not have a renewal. At the same time, Skydance co-CEO David Ellison has not given Latcham any mandate on which projects should come first. Ellison and Ynon Kreiz were vocal on a recent earnings call about the bleeding in the Warner Bros feature slate, which makes the new regime's priorities plain: profitable first, sentimental second, if at all.
For Latcham, that means the first test is not whether DC has ideas. It is whether he can sort the inherited pile fast enough to decide which of them still deserve to become films or series at all.
