Highlights:
- Reports suggest James Gunn's position at DC Studios could be decided within months, following Supergirl's disappointing 2026 box office performance.
- It's not the first time his job has been on the line. He was fired outright from Marvel in 2018, then rehired within a year after a fan campaign.
- Along the way, he's picked fights over Superman's politics, a squirrel, a swear word, and a Deadline casting report, dividing fans on whether he's a bold creative voice or a liability the studio can't keep excusing.
The question DC fans are actually arguing about right now isn't whether James Gunn has had controversies. It's whether this one, the one about his own job, is the controversy that finally sticks. Reports suggest his future at DC Studios could be decided within months, after Supergirl underperformed at the box office this year, turning a co-CEO who built his reputation on creative confidence into someone whose own leadership is now the story.
It's not the first time Gunn's career has hinged on a single moment. Here's the full run of controversies that got him here, and why this one feels different.
1. The 2018 firing that cost him Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Old tweets from 2008 to 2011, joking about topics including pedophilia and rape, resurfaced after being dug up by conservative commentators. Disney moved fast: studio chairman Alan Horn called the posts "indefensible" and severed the company's relationship with Gunn within a day of the story breaking, pulling him off Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 entirely.
2. Gunn's apology, and the political angle nobody expected
Gunn responded almost immediately, calling the old jokes "totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative" and saying he'd regretted them for years. The story took an unexpected political turn when Donald Trump Jr. amplified the resurfaced tweets on social media, given Gunn's history as a vocal Trump critic, adding a partisan layer to what had started as an entertainment industry story.
3. The reinstatement that split fans down the middle
Less than a year later, Disney reversed course and rehired Gunn to write and direct Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after cast members and fans campaigned on his behalf. It remains one of the rare instances of a major studio publicly reversing a firing of this scale, and it didn't land as a clean redemption story for everyone watching.
4. Superman's political messaging, and Dean Cain's pushback
When Gunn's 2025 Superman swapped the character's old "truth, justice, and the American way" tagline for "truth, justice, and a better tomorrow", and framed Superman explicitly as an immigrant story, it drew public criticism from Dean Cain, who played the character in the 1990s series Lois & Clark. Cain accused the film of being reshaped to fit contemporary politics. Some fans called it a faithful return to the character's original 1938 immigrant roots. Others called it exactly the kind of change Cain warned about. Both camps have been arguing about it since, and neither has come close to convincing the other.
James Gunn attends the Los Angeles premiere of "Superman" at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California, on July 7, 2025. Getty Images
5. The squirrel Warner Bros. almost cut
Not every Gunn controversy is serious. During Superman's edit, a scene of the hero saving a squirrel mid-battle reportedly caused genuine internal arguments, with some test audiences questioning why it was there at all. Gunn insisted on keeping it in. It's a small story, but it's a useful reminder that plenty of what gets called "controversial" in entertainment coverage is really just a creative disagreement that leaked.
6. The line Guy Gardner almost didn't get to say
A tighter internal fight nearly cut one of Superman's biggest laugh lines, when Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner was originally written with a much cruder insult aimed at Superman than what made the final cut. Gunn has since confirmed the joke was toned down specifically because of how the studio felt about the original wording, a small but telling look at how much gets negotiated behind a single line of dialogue.
7. The Deadline feud that showed a different side of Gunn
When Deadline reported that four actors had tested for a key role in his Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow, Gunn didn't just deny it quietly. He went public and called the report inaccurate, dismissing it as "shoddy" reporting and disputing the details point by point. Supporters saw a boss defending his production from bad information. Critics saw an executive who's a little too comfortable picking public fights with the press covering his own studio.
8. Supergirl's box office, and the question fans can't agree on
This is the one that actually threatens the job. Following Supergirl's disappointing box office performance in 2026, reports suggested Gunn's future at DC Studios could be decided within months, with his own creative choices under scrutiny as the person who positioned himself as the studio's guarantor of quality. Superman performed well enough in 2025 to buy him goodwill; Supergirl spent a good chunk of it.
Craig Gillespie, Peter Safran, Milly Alcock and James Gunn attend the SUPERGIRL World Premiere on June 22, 2026 in New York City. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures
The fan argument splits roughly here: one side says one underperforming film in a slate this size shouldn't cost a co-CEO his job, especially one who delivered a genuine hit just a year earlier. The other side says Gunn built his entire pitch on being the person who'd fix DC's creative direction, and if that pitch doesn't hold up under pressure, the accountability should be real, not theoretical. Whichever side is right, Gunn's next two films are no longer just being watched as movies. They're being watched as his answer.
Eight controversies, eight completely different registers, from a firing that nearly ended his career to a fight over a casting rumour, to a question that could end this chapter of it. What connects them isn't the severity. It's that Gunn rarely lets any of them go unanswered, for better or worse, and this is the first one where the answer isn't entirely up to him.
