James Gunn has had enough. Less than three years after he was announced as the new co-CEO of DC Studios, the comic book nerd with the Warner Bros.-sized checkbook is ready to usher in his new era of the DCU with the July 11 release of Superman. And if it were up to him, we’d never hear about three of the most iconic comic-book hero origin stories again.
Superhero lore is as ingrained in a lot of people’s minds as American history. Nearly everyone between the ages of 6 and 86 knows how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, how a billionaire orphan turned into Batman, and how an abandoned alien from Krypton became Superman. If those origins were questioned on Jeopardy!, they wouldn’t be worth any more than $100. That cultural ubiquity is exactly why Gunn told The Times he has no interest in movies wasting time telling a story we’ve all known for decades.
“I don’t need to see pearls in a back alley when Batman’s parents are killed. I don’t need to see the radioactive spider biting Spider-Man. And I don’t need to see baby Kal coming from Krypton in a little baby rocket. We have watched a million movies with characters who don’t have their upbringing explained, like when we see Good Night, and Good Luck—we don’t need to know the early life of Edward R. Murrow to explain how he became a journalist. Who cares?”
That’s a good question: Who cares? The central purpose those origin stories serve is to connect us with the heroes on a human level. Most of us don’t have more money than God or a Batcave nicer than most homes, but we all know losing our parents could emotionally damage us forever. Yet with the success of grounded superhero movies like Matt Reeves’s The Batman, we’re now seeing more films take a similar approach, relying heavily on exploring their heroes as people as they seek to deconstruct these legendary characters. We don’t need to see his parents’ murder early in the film to grasp the nature of his internal torment later on. He’s a broken man throughout the film for numerous reasons and is only held together by a dutiful compulsion to prevent crime.
From defending his upcoming Superman movie’s political slant to deriding critics who think his choice for the Man of Steel is a “pussy,” Gunn didn’t hold back in his Times interview. And hopefully, he keeps disrupting the superhero industrial complex known as Hollywood for years to come.