Welcome To MovieAnimeX ! It started with a bang that felt like an ending. Zack Snyder’s Justice League finally hit screens in its full form in 2021. The Snyderverse had its defenders, its theatrical cuts, its memes, and its very public drama. Then the lights went out. New management walked into the building. In late 2022, James Gunn and Peter Safran were handed the keys to DC Studios. The message was clear: this time they would build something that actually connected, something with a plan.
In January 2023 they stood up and delivered exactly that — Chapter One: Gods and Monsters. Ten projects. Movies and series. Creature Commandos would open the door. Waller would deepen the black-ops side. Superman (then still called Legacy) would plant the flag. Lanterns would bring the cosmic cops. Paradise Lost would explore the Amazons. The Authority would go radical. The Brave and the Bold would introduce Damian Wayne. Booster Gold would lean into comedy. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow would give us a harder-edged Kara. Swamp Thing would get weird and gothic. It was ambitious. It was public. For a moment it felt like DC finally had a map.
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The Map That Started Changing Almost Immediately
Fast-forward to late August 2026. How much of that map is still on the table?
Creature Commandos Season 1 arrived and did its job as a soft launch. Superman landed in July 2025, earned strong reviews, and banked roughly $616–618 million worldwide. It felt like the real beginning. Peacemaker Season 2 continued the Gunn flavor. Then Supergirl arrived in June 2026… and the air left the room. A reported $170–186 million production budget, mixed-to-negative reviews, and a worldwide haul around $126 million. Second place behind Toy Story 5 on opening weekend. The studio’s second major theatrical swing had become a clear miss.
Lanterns premiered on HBO in mid-August. Clayface is still headed for theaters later this year. Man of Tomorrow (the Superman sequel) is filming for a July 2027 release. Creature Commandos Season 2 is coming. That is the core that has actually moved.
The rest? Waller has stalled or quietly faded. Paradise Lost is no longer moving forward. Booster Gold lost its showrunner and is back near square one. The Authority and Swamp Thing remain in the vague “in development” zone. The Brave and the Bold is still out there somewhere in the distance. Side projects and mid-tier additions keep popping up while the big connective tissue keeps getting delayed or deprioritized.
The Superman family is carrying almost the entire weight of the “main progress.” Everything else feels like side quests.
And Now… A True-Crime Mockumentary About a Talking Gorilla
Just days after Lanterns began airing, HBO Max officially ordered an eight-episode half-hour comedy called The People v. Gorilla Grodd. Skyler Gisondo reprises Jimmy Olsen from Superman. Jimmy Tatro plays the hyper-intelligent ape. Several Daily Planet regulars (Beck Bennett’s Steve Lombard, Mikaela Hoover’s Cat Grant, Wendell Pierce’s Perry White) return. The creators of American Vandal are running the show. The premise: Jimmy directs and stars in a “true-crime” docuseries investigating whether Gorilla Grodd was wrongly convicted of murdering his father, the King of Gorilla City, in one of Metropolis’ most famous trials.
It is funny. It is weird. It is pure Gunn-era DC — leaning hard into the absurdity of the comics while expanding the Superman corner of the universe. And it is also the perfect illustration of the current problem. While the original Gods and Monsters slate still has major pieces missing or delayed, while Supergirl just underperformed, and while the larger Justice League-level connective tissue remains years away, the studio is greenlighting a single-season mockumentary about a psychic gorilla’s murder trial.
Why this? Because it is relatively cheap, it keeps the Superman world warm, it gives HBO Max something quirky and shareable, and (under the current merger uncertainty) it is the kind of short-term commitment that can still get made without needing massive long-term corporate buy-in. It is entertaining on paper. It is also another side quest while the main campaign still feels incomplete.
The Complication Nobody Asked For
As if the internal slate struggles weren’t enough, the entire parent company is in the middle of a $110+ billion acquisition by Paramount Skydance. David Ellison has already met with Gunn and Safran. Early signals have been polite — “pretty open,” “big fan,” the train has left the station on projects already in motion. But the deal itself is tangled in antitrust lawsuits, delayed, and may not close until well into 2027. That means the people currently steering the DCU are operating under a cloud of ownership uncertainty. Long-term creative control, tone, and priorities can shift the moment the ink dries.
Everything is complicated. The slate is half-delivered, half-limbo. The box office has already delivered one clear warning shot. The corporate parent is about to change hands. And the audience is starting to ask the quiet question out loud: is this actually going somewhere, or are we just watching another cycle of promising announcements that slowly shrink into side projects?
Remember How Marvel Did Phase One?
Marvel announced its early plan after Iron Man proved the concept worked. Between 2008 and 2012 they released six films: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers. Four years. Six movies. Clear character introductions. Steady world-building. A payoff that felt earned. They did not over-announce a decade of titles on day one and then watch half of them drift into development hell. They built, adjusted only when necessary, and delivered the team-up that justified the investment.
DC announced a full chapter’s worth of titles in early 2023. More than three and a half years later, the theatrical foundation is still basically Superman + one expensive relative who underperformed + a growing pile of television side quests (including, now, a gorilla true-crime comedy). That gap in velocity and follow-through is the real story.
Lanterns: The Good News That Still Feels Conditional
Right now, Lanterns is the brightest light on the board. After two episodes, the series is working. Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart have real chemistry — grumpy mentor and reluctant protégé, grounded detective story mixed with cosmic undercurrents. The True Detective DNA is there without feeling like pure cosplay. The Nebraska setting, the dual timelines, the slow reveal of something larger and weirder: it feels like prestige television that happens to feature power rings. Early reviews have been strong for a reason. It is the best pure DCU television so far.
Episode 2 quietly drops one of the more interesting world-building details yet. While Hal is recovering in the suspiciously empty Rushville hospital, he presses Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald) about her background. She admits she is not from the small Nebraska town at all. “I’m from Gotham. Moved here on a whim.” The line is delivered casually, but it lands with weight. Combined with a phone call in the pilot where Kerry tells someone to “tell Barb I said hi,” fans immediately started connecting dots — possible ties to Jim Gordon, Barbara Gordon, or even the Kane family that includes Batwoman in the comics. It is the first clear, spoken confirmation that Gotham exists in this new DCU and that its influence (and its people) can reach into other corners of the universe.
And yet the bigger question still hangs over every frame: what is the point if this remains isolated? If Lanterns stays a self-contained HBO event that never meaningfully feeds the larger universe the way Netflix’s Daredevil once felt essential to the street-level MCU conversation, then even a good show becomes another beautiful side quest. A Gotham name-drop is exciting. It teases a bigger map. But until that map actually connects — until these characters and locations start mattering beyond their own series — fans will watch, enjoy the performances, and then wait to see whether any of it actually matters three years from now.
The Path Forward (If There Is One)
Man of Tomorrow is the next major checkpoint. Gunn is back in the director’s chair. David Corenswet returns. The Superman family continues. Clayface will test whether audiences will show up for something more horror-leaning. Lanterns will either build cultural momentum or remain a well-reviewed curiosity. The gorilla mockumentary will either become a delightful oddity or another example of the studio filling the calendar while the bigger pieces lag. And somewhere in the background, the Paramount deal will either stabilize the ship or rock it again.
The original promise of Gods and Monsters was interconnection and momentum. So far the momentum has been concentrated in one corner of the map while the rest of the territory stays foggy. Side projects keep the lights on. The big, connective pieces keep slipping.
DC has had false starts before. It has had ambitious reboots before. It has had passionate fanbases that eventually grew tired of waiting for the pieces to lock into place. This time the pieces were announced early and clearly. The fact that so many of them are still missing, delayed, or quietly set aside — while a Jimmy Olsen true-crime series about Gorilla Grodd gets the green light — is what makes the current moment feel precarious.
Superman worked. Lanterns is working. That is not nothing. But a universe cannot live forever on one family, one strong streaming series, and an endless supply of quirky side quests. At some point the side quests have to stop feeling like the main campaign.
Right now, looking at the slate, the box office reality, the corporate turbulence, and the growing gap between announcement and delivery, it is hard to escape the feeling that only a genuine miracle — another clear theatrical win, a sudden acceleration of the remaining projects, or an ownership transition that somehow strengthens rather than freezes the plan — can still pull the DCU fully out of the woods.
The map was drawn. The journey has been slower, narrower, and more fragile than anyone hoped. The next couple of years will decide whether that map still leads somewhere worth traveling… or whether it becomes another beautiful, unfinished sketch filled with talking gorillas and unfinished business.
