James Gunn is flying high right now. Superman, which he wrote and directed, has won two consecutive weeks at the box office, bringing in $235 million in its first 10 days.
It’s an auspicious start for the inaugural film for Warner Bros.’ DC Studios and its rebooted DC Universe, which is also co-run by Gunn.
But less than a decade ago, he was in a very different place. In 2018, after Gunn criticized then-President Donald Trump on then-Twitter, right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich dug up old tweets Gunn had posted between 2008 and 2012, making jokes about pedophilia, rape, and the Holocaust.
He publicly apologized, but the ensuing media brouhaha led Disney to cut ties with Gunn, despite the filmmaker producing two of the company’s biggest recent hits, including Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2.
“My life was gone,” Gunn said in a recent episode of Armchair Expert, a podcast hosted by Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. “I thought my career was over. I didn’t think I was gonna make another dime in this industry. I thought I was gonna have to hold onto whatever I had made, which was nowhere near as much as I had hoped it would be, to last for the rest of my life, and live a really frugal life.”
As it turned out, Disney received a ton of criticism after firing Gunn. Actors from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, as well as other entertainers, comedians, and journalists, slammed the decision. Bobcat Goldthwait, who provided a voice for the 1997 Disney film Hercules, asked Disney to remove his voice from an upcoming park attraction based on the movie in response to the incident. An online petition urging Disney to rehire Gunn got over 400,000 signatures.
“I had lost all the power I had, I had lost the ability to cast anybody, I had lost everything,” Gunn recalled.
He said this period of his life helped him have a realization about himself.
“I realized that everything I had done was really to be rich and famous so that people would love me. And I wanted people to love me,” he said.
But hearing 8,000 people chanting his name at a Comic-Con event in Brazil still left him feeling empty.
Instead, after he was let go by Disney weeks later, Gunn said he “got so much love”—from Jennifer Holland, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, as well as the other cast members from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies like Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, and Dave Bautista.
“I was overwhlemed with it, and I experienced being loved for the first time,” Gunn said. “I went to sleep that night going, you know, this started out as the worst day of my life, but I actually think it’s the best day of my life. Because I learned that I don’t need to tap dance till the bones are showing through my toes to get people to like me.”
In 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced Gunn would be one of the two new heads of DC Studios, helping oversee the creative direction of the new DC Universe across movies, TV, and animation.
It meant he could no longer work with Marvel Studios and Disney, which had rehired Gunn in 2019 to make Guardians of the Galaxy 3
But it did mean he would get to write and direct his own take on Superman, about his early years in Metropolis. Superman is now in theaters.
