
It’s time to usher in a new era of DC movies. Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran have taken the reins of the rebranded DC Studios, and they brought a long-term plan to DC with them.
The new projects on the DC docket are meant to reboot or reshape the movie versions of DC’s best-known heroes as established in the Snyderverse, while reaching into some deeper corners of the DC canon for more obscure characters. Gunn and Safran have wrapped up the previous DCEU era, replacing it with just “the DCU,” a mainline continuity that will exist alongside DC Elseworlds, an umbrella for other DC film and TV universes, like Todd Phillips’ Joker movies or Matt Reeves’ The Batman and The Penguin.
Here’s everything DC is currently planning to put in theaters and on TV screens, this year and well into the future.
The first of the new Gunn/Safran features to hit theaters, Superman seems expressly designed to break the DCEU mold. Gunn has called the film “the true foundation of [their] creative vision for the DC Universe,” and said he “can’t wait to introduce [their] version of Superman.” Previously called Superman: Legacy, the feature stars David Corenswet as Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, and a whole cadre of other DC Comics superheroes, including Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), and the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría).
Read Polygon’s review of DC Studios’ new Superman movie to decide whether you should be there opening weekend, or maybe hold out for Gunn’s movie streaming on HBO Max.
The second season of Netflix’s live-action series based on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman has arrived, three years after the first season, and under the shadow of sexual assault accusations against Gaiman that saw most of his other screen adaptations canceled, delayed, or put on indefinite hold. The first part of Sandman season 2, spanning six episodes, is streaming on Netflix as of July 3.
The second and final season of The Sandman sees Morpheus rebuilding his realm, the Dreaming; taking a trip to Hell; and reconnecting with siblings Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Those plotlines and more (plus material moved or modified from other storylines that were cut from the show) comprise the first half of the season. Five more episodes and a special adaptation of Death: The High Cost of Living will round out the series in the second half of the season, debuting on Netflix on July 24.
Alongside everything else with his name on it in the DC Universe, Gunn hasn’t forgotten his Suicide Squad spin-off Peacemaker. The oddball but compelling comedy series will return for a second season after the release of Superman. As revealed in the first teaser trailer for Peacemaker season 2, Christopher Smith (John Cena) tries and fails to join the Justice Gang, the proto Justice League introduced in Superman. Meanwhile, Rick Flagg, Sr. (Frank Grillo) seeks his revenge on Peacemaker for the death of Rick’s son (Joel Kinnaman) during the events of The Suicide Squad.
“John Cena has improved as an actor in a way that I have — honest to God, I have never seen anyone who has gotten so much better in such a short amount of time,” Gunn told attendees at New York Comic Con 2024. “He was great in the first season. This season, he owns, and he’s amazing.”
Peacemaker returns to HBO Max on Aug. 21. Season 2 will run eight episodes.
Just as 2025’s Superman is meant to present a new view of Superman for the DCU, the Supergirl movie will be based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s celebrated Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow series, which sees the Woman of Steel playing the Rooster Cogburn role in an interstellar take on True Grit. Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon) will play Supergirl. (She has a brief cameo in the role in Superman. Jason Momoa (Aquaman) will play rude, crude space bounty hunter Lobo (not Aquaman).
While Kara Zor-El’s stand-alone movie was previously titled Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, just like the change from Superman: Legacy to Superman, it’s now known simply as Supergirl.
Clayface, a solo outing for the Batman villain, wasn’t originally in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s plans for the DCU. But writer and filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep) nonetheless impressed the DCU heads with his “horror-thriller-tragedy” idea, and now we’re getting a Clayface movie!
And it sure sounds like a new take on Clayface’s most consistent origin story, featuring overlooked actor Basil Karlo, whose adoption of experimental stage makeup transforms his body into a monstrous form of malleable clay. Tom Rhys Harries (White Lines, Suspicion) is attached to star as Karlo/Clayface.
Gunn, Safran, Lynn Harris, and The Batman director Matt Reeves are set to produce.
The 2011 live-action Green Lantern movie (starring Ryan Reynolds as original Green Lantern Hal Jordan) was such a legendary flop, it scuttled DC’s plans at the time for a new interconnected superhero universe, and Reynolds keeps finding new ways to publicly mock the film, especially in his Deadpool movies.
A new take on the Green Lanterns, simply called Lanterns, will be an intergalactic-cop TV series that attempts to revive Hal Jordan for the screen, played by Kyle Chandler (Zero Dark Thirty) alongside Aaron Pierre (Rebel Ridge, The Underground Railroad) as Green Lantern John Stewart.
Lanterns, an eight-episode series, is coming to HBO Max sometime in “early 2026,” according to Warner Bros.
The long, contentious history behind 2022’s The Batman didn’t leave much room for hope: As one of those movies that got bounced from team to team for years, changing shape at every bounce, it looked like a project destined to be driven more by market calculation than by a specific vision. But director and co-writer Matt Reeves found an effective take on the Dark Knight that resonated with audiences and landed solidly at the box office, and DC immediately greenlit a sequel, again with Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader. No plot details are clear yet, though Pattinson and Reeves have been blue-skying about a lot of things they’d like to do: the Court of Owls storyline, maybe? Mr. Freeze? Calendar Man, for god’s sake?
After some lengthy delays in getting a sequel to The Batman off the ground, Reeves and co-writer Mattson Tomlin turned in a script in June 2025, a much-needed update on Part 2’s progress.
Dynamic Duo is reportedly an animated movie about the origins of original Robin Dick Grayson and the second kid to fill his little green shoes, Jason Todd, a joint project between Gunn and Safran’s DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures Animation written by Matthew Aldrich (Coco, Lightyear).
The Authority began its editorial life in the pages of the Wildstorm line, the independent superhero setting of then-upstart comic publisher Image Comics, founded in 1992 by current DC Comics chief creative officer Jim Lee.
Ironically, shortly after the characters came together, Wildstorm itself was acquired by DC Comics, and another decade later, the Authority — headed by the foulmouthed Jenny Sparks and Trench Coat Guy par excellence Jack Hawksmoor, and whose roster included Midnighter and Apollo, clear analogs for Superman and Batman who were quite seriously married to each other — was brought into DC Comics continuity itself.
The Authority is still in development, though one of its team members, the Engineer, debuted first in Superman. As of 2025, prospects for DC Studios’ Authority movie are looking a little darker. Gunn and Safran said that some story elements from Superman and other planned projects “step a little bit on The Authority.” Gunn added that the script has “had a harder time coming along” and noted that the film “hasn’t been as much of a priority because it has been subsumed” by other projects. Hmm.
Taking its title from a Silver Age DC Comic that traditionally featured team-up stories, The Brave and the Bold will introduce Batman’s biological son Damian to the DCU — he’s the fifth of Batman’s many Robins — with a story inspired by Grant Morrison’s interpretation of the character in the Batman and Son run of the Batman comic. This will be Damian’s first appearance in a live-action film, though the character has appeared in animated form in TV and movies. The continuity of this film will be separate from Matt Reeves’ planned The Batman movies; it’s meant to establish the new DCU continuity for Batman and Robin.
One of the biggest twists in the DCU moviemaking saga was the emergence of a Sgt. Rock movie: The World War II hero — shown above fighting, uh, Nazi zombies — was reportedly going to feature in a live-action movie that would pair Rock with a French Resistance fighter trying to find the mystical Spear of Destiny before the Nazis do.
More surprising was who was originally involved. Director Luca Guadagnino (Queer, Challengers) was set to helm, with Daniel Craig and Colin Farrell attached to star at one point. But Sgt. Rock is now… not moving forward? Or maybe it is? James Gunn says DC Studios is still developing a Sgt. Rock picture, though when it will actually emerge is unclear.
Swamp Thing, a plant-elemental hero who (depending on which comics you’re reading) might or might not be a mutated version of scientist Alec Holland, dates back to 1971, and was successfully rebooted by Watchmen author Alan Moore in 1984. But it’ll be a while before we get to see what that looks like on the DC side.
Though Gunn has called Swamp Thing a “passion project” for James Mangold, the writer-director has a Star Wars movie to finish first.
Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ excellent 2017 limited series Mister Miracle is being adapted for animation. The animated series will tell the story of Scott Free, “the greatest escape artist who ever lived” as he tries to pull off the ultimate trick: escaping death itself.
Mister Miracle, which is undated, will begin with something “[going] horribly wrong with the perfect life that Scott and his warrior wife Big Barda have built for themselves on Earth.”
Deadline reported in 2024 that Warner Bros. is developing an animated Blue Beetle series, focusing on the Jaime Reyes version of the character, as featured in 2023’s Blue Beetle. Miguel Puga, co-creator of the Nickelodeon series The Casagrandes, will serve as showrunner.
DC hasn’t said much about this TV series — except for Gunn announcing it as part of his and Safran’s new slate. It’s meant to bring the comics’ fan-favorite comic-relief character to the screen for his own comedic adventures.
Rounding out DC Comics’ Big Three in the DCU is a planned new movie based on Wonder Woman. James Gunn confirmed to EW in June that the movie’s script is “being written right now.” And that’s about all that we know about it. But like Superman and various Batman projects, don’t expect any carryover from the Gal Gadot-led Wonder Woman movies.
This series is set in Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira, and DC’s press release says it “focuses on the genesis and political intrigue of an island of all women.” Sounds a bit like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in terms of turning a familiar fantasy story into a political origin story. We haven’t heard much about the series since Gunn announced it in 2023, so it’s still unclear as of yet whether Wonder Woman herself will have a role in the story, and whether the series will connect with Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman movies.
Gunn’s hilarious, heartfelt Suicide Squad spinoff series Peacemaker was greenlit for a second season in February 2022, but Gunn put that project on hold for a bit to concentrate on other things — including Waller, the previously untitled Peacemaker spinoff centered on Viola Davis as no-nonsense supervillain resource broker Amanda Waller. The character, introduced to DC’s movie continuity in David Ayer’s little-loved 2016 version of Suicide Squad (though she’s been part of the comics continuity since 1986), is one of the few elements of Ayer’s movie that was held over in Gunn’s 2021 reboot/reshuffle movie, The Suicide Squad.
But after production was delayed by the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, Waller was pushed back on the DC Studios rollout. Gunn maintains the show is still alive.
A live-action Teen Titans movie exists in very early form at DC Studios, with Supergirl screenwriter Ana Nogueira having turned in a draft of the in-development project, according to James Gunn. “It was something that Ana was really impassioned about, and she turned over an amazing script for us,” Gunn said in February. “She’s fiddling with that now, but it’s definitely not a finished script.”
The Teen Titans made their first appearance in 1964, with Kid Flash/Wally West, Robin/Dick Grayson, and Aqualad/Garth teaming up in The Brave and the Bold, later adding Wonder Girl/Donna Troy and many others (e.g., Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire, Raven) to their ranks. Of course, the Teen Titans already have an incredibly popular adaptation in the form of Teen Titans Go!, an animated Cartoon Network comedy series.
Batman and Robin/Nightwing nemeses Bane and Deathstroke may be teaming up for a live-action movie of their own. Peter Safran confirmed to reporters in February that screenwriter Matthew Orton (Moon Knight, Cleaner) is working on a script for DC Studios, which Gunn described as “something kind of like” a Deathstroke and Bane story.
What does this all mean? Maybe nothing, considering the long list of projects on DC Studios’ plate, but clearly the executives and creatives are trying anything and everyone for the new DCU.
Director Francis Lawrence and star Keanu Reeves are committed to bringing their very “spirit of the character, if not the letter” version of John Constantine back to screens. Apparently there have been meetings with Gunn! And there’s a script! I’d watch it.
DC announced in early 2021 that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates would reboot Superman with a movie that would put a Black man in the title role. Details have been thin regarding whether this film would tie into an existing DC comics story — for instance, whether this might be a movie outing for temporary Superman successor Steel or a complete reimagining of the character — but the film was meant to be produced by J.J. Abrams under his Bad Robot imprint. As of 2023, the project was still going forward in the wake of Gunn and Safran’s new slate, but no release date has been announced.
While I occasionally work as a games critic and editor, my full-time job is telling people to watch Poker Face. Absolutely no one has heard of it, despite its being one of the best things on TV right now. So here I combine my roles into one. Season two of the Peacock show wraps this week, meaning right now is exactly…