The reveal of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU roadmap has brought a sense of excitement to many fans but also left others feeling a little confused about the proposed “connected” list of movies, and TV shows announced today. One other comment that has been made about the new-look DCU is that it is once again attempting to emulate the insurmountable Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, James Gunn has already addressed this complaint by stating that the DCU is not “Marvel 2.0.” In his address to the press, Gunn said:

“A lot of people think is going to be Marvel 2.0 and definitely, I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences. I think that one of the reasons why I love DC is that it really is another universe. It’s an alternate world. With Marvel, generally, it’s New York, Chicago, San Francisco….Here at DCU, we have Metropolis, Gotham, Themyscira, and Atlantis and all of that is another fictional universe, and this is the world that we’re creating.
We’re coming into a world where superheroes exist and have existed for some time in one form or another, and that’s the universe. We are telling a big huge central story that is like Marvel Studios, except for I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel did from the beginning, because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely. But we’re also creating a universe that is like Star Wars where there’s different times and different places, different things, or like Game of Thrones, where characters are a little bit more morally complex.”

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Fans Are Struggling to Work Out the Connection Between The DCU’s Chapter 1 Projects

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James Gunn’s description of the first stage of the DCU being like a Star Wars Universe helps make a little more sense of why many announced projects don’t seem to have much in common. While there is a lot to be revealed about these projects and what comes next, Gunn is confident that the story he already has mapped out will work, although there is nothing to say it won’t also have some changes to make as they progress. He added:

“I started [Guardians of the Galaxy] with a story of what that trilogy was, where it started and where it ended. That story is just the smaller version of doing this. I’ve been inside a company that did very well. It’s very different than us. Marvel didn’t have everything completely worked out ahead of time, but they did a lot of things really well — one of which is not giving up. I really love that about Kevin [Feige] and Lou [D’Esposito] and the old gang — that I’ve seen them turn bad movies into okay movies, okay movies into good movies, and good movies into great movies as because they do not f—ing stop. They give it whatever it needs to make it as good as it can possibly be until the 11th hour, and there’ll be editing the day before the premiere. A lot. Too much. It’s going to take a while, it’s going to take a bit of explanation, but we’re very confident that by the time Superman: Legacy comes out, that people will understand that what they’ll understand and what the DCU is.”