James Gunn Is Out at DC Studios. Is DC’s Horror Experiment Next? What ‘Clayface’ Proved and What’s at Risk for ‘Swamp Thing’ and ‘Constantine’
The man who wrote the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and made Slither spent his last month running DC Studios watching a body-horror movie about a melting B-movie actor become one of the few unambiguous wins on his ledger. Then he lost the job anyway. On November 9, Skydance announced that James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping away from the top of DC Studios, with Marvel Studios veteran Jeremy Latcham taking over as president and chief creative officer on December 1.
Most of the coverage has focused on Superman, Batman and the fate of the capes. We care about something else: the small, weird, R-rated horror lane that Gunn and Safran carved out of a superhero studio. Clayface just crossed $109 million worldwide on a roughly $40 million budget. Swamp Thing has James Mangold attached. Constantine got a new writer less than a week ago. Below, we lay out what's confirmed about the shake-up, how the horror titles performed, what's at risk, and why the next six months decide whether DC horror was a phase or a future.
Watch the 'Clayface' Final Trailer
Here's the film that may end up as the Gunn-Safran era's clearest proof of concept: James Watkins' body-horror riff on the Batman villain, starring Tom Rhys Harries.
What's Confirmed About the DC Studios Shake-Up
The facts that every outlet agrees on are fairly short. Per TheWrap, Skydance said Gunn and Safran will go back to their creative work full time, starting with post-production on Gunn's Superman: Man of Tomorrow. Latcham starts December 1 and will oversee DC film, TV and animation, reporting to Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, the co-chairs of Skydance Motion Picture Group. Gunn and Safran remain producers on a number of DC projects.
The context matters. Paramount's roughly $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closed in October, according to Variety. Under the old regime, Gunn and Safran reported straight to David Zaslav. Under the new one, David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz planned to slot them under the Skydance film chiefs, which Variety characterized as effectively a demotion. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, as cited by Esquire, describe the exit as a push rather than a voluntary step back. The official statements are warmer: Ellison and Kreiz credited the pair with launching a new era, and Gunn wrote online that he was relieved to return to pure filmmaking and that the characters they set up will live on.
Latcham's résumé is pure Marvel. TheWrap notes he was part of Kevin Feige's founding team, with credits including Iron Man , The Avengers and the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, and that he worked with Gunn on all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Fiction Horizon, summarizing trade reporting, says he's reportedly expected to favor crowd-pleasing tentpoles. That single word, crowd-pleasing, is the part that should make horror fans nervous.
Who James Gunn Was Before the Capes
It's easy to forget that Gunn came up in the gutter of the genre, and we mean that as the highest compliment. He started at Troma, co-writing Tromeo and Juliet in 1996. He wrote the screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, which opened to $26.7 million in March 2004 and finished at $103.5 million worldwide on a $28 million budget, per The Numbers. It remains one of the best-regarded horror remakes of its decade.
His directing debut was less kind to him at the box office. Slither , the gooey alien-slug comedy he wrote and directed for Universal, opened to just $3.9 million on March 31, 2006 and topped out at $12.9 million worldwide against a $15.25 million budget, per The Numbers. It has since become a cult favorite, and you can see its DNA in every squishy practical effect Gunn has championed since. Later, as a producer, he backed Brightburn (2019), the evil-Superman horror film written by his brother Brian and cousin Mark, which turned a $7 million budget into $33.2 million worldwide, per The Numbers.
So when DC Studios greenlit a $40 million R-rated body-horror film about a disfigured actor instead of a fifth Batman villain origin story, it didn't look random. It looked like a horror guy using his keys.
Photo: James Watkins via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
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By the Numbers: What 'Clayface' Actually Did
Clayface opened wide on October 23 in 3,458 theaters and took No. 1 with $24 million domestic and $43 million globally, per TheWrap, which also reported an A- CinemaScore, a genuinely rare grade for a horror movie. As of this week, The Numbers has it at about $57.3 million domestic and $52.4 million international, roughly $109.7 million worldwide, with a $40 million production budget (some outlets cite $44 million). It runs 108 minutes and is rated R.
The team behind it is a horror résumé in itself. Director James Watkins made Eden Lake , then The Woman in Black , which grossed $129 million worldwide on a $15 million budget in 2012, per The Numbers. His 2024 Speak No Evil remake made $77.5 million on $15 million. The screenplay is by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, from Flanagan's story. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, with Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, David Dencik and Eddie Marsan in support.
Now compare it with its own studio. Variety reports Supergirl took in about $126 million worldwide this summer on a $170 million budget. Clayface has essentially matched that gross for less than a quarter of the cost. It isn't perfect: Variety's sources say Clayface still won't fully break even until home entertainment and streaming revenue are counted, and it lost the No. 1 spot during its second weekend (we broke down that 57% drop here). But in a year when the expensive DC bets wobbled, the cheap scary one is the one that over-delivered relative to its price.
The DC Horror Slate: What's at Risk
Here's where things stand for every DC project with real horror DNA, based on MakeUseOf's tally of the slate (drawn from THR's reporting), plus iHorror and Dread Central:
- Swamp Thing : James Mangold has been attached to write and direct since early 2023. Per iHorror, Safran said last month the script is being written. No date. Mangold has described it as a simple, clean Gothic horror movie.
- Constantine : Francis Galluppi, the filmmaker behind The Last Stop in Yuma County and the upcoming Evil Dead Wrath , was hired to write a new script ( our full story). Still early development.
- Creature Commandos Season 2: Gunn's adult animated monster squad is still listed as coming, with no date.
- Poison Ivy : a live-action HBO project reportedly in development, a natural fit for plant-based body horror.
- Clayface follow-ups: nothing announced. Fiction Horizon, citing THR, says Gunn and Safran reportedly wanted more smaller, spookier DC films in this mold before their exit.
None of these has been canceled. That's the honest headline. But nearly all of them are early enough that a new boss can quietly shelve them without anyone noticing a press release, and that's how projects usually die in Hollywood: not with an announcement, but with silence.
Photo: James Mangold via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
Analysis: Why DC Horror Might Survive the People Who Built It
There are two ways to read the Gunn-Safran exit for horror, and both are plausible. The pessimistic read: Variety's insiders say the studio spent big on lesser-known characters, specifically naming Supergirl and Clayface, and Latcham's Marvel pedigree points toward bigger, safer, four-quadrant movies. A boss tasked with getting DC back to basics doesn't usually start by asking for more R-rated films about swamp monsters and chain-smoking exorcists.
The optimistic read is the math. A $40 million horror film that grosses $109 million is exactly the kind of business a cost-conscious owner should love. Look at how horror spin-offs have worked elsewhere. Sony's Venom films printed money by leaning toward grime. Fox's Logan , directed by the same James Mangold now on Swamp Thing , proved an R-rated, downbeat comic movie could be a phenomenon. Warner itself has spent the past decade turning The Conjuring universe into one of the most reliable profit engines in the business. The lesson across all three is that a mid-budget scary movie with a known name is less a gamble than a hedge.
Our take: the films most likely to survive are the ones with filmmakers who bring their own audience. Mangold is an Oscar-nominated writer-director with a franchise track record, and a Gothic Swamp Thing could be made at a price that won't scare a spreadsheet. Constantine has a built-in fanbase that has been asking for an R-rated return since 2005. The most fragile ideas are the ones that existed mostly in Gunn's head, the reported slate of smaller horror experiments that never made it to a public announcement.
There's also a timing wrinkle. According to Esquire, citing Puck, there's chatter that the DCU could be rebooted after Man of Tomorrow opens July 9, 2027. A reboot would actually help standalone horror titles, which never relied on shared-universe continuity to begin with. Clayface worked because it was a creepy movie about one man falling apart, not because it set up a crossover.
What We Still Don't Know
- Whether Latcham will keep Mangold's Swamp Thing on its current track, or reset it.
- Whether Galluppi's Constantine script is still wanted, and whether Keanu Reeves is part of any plan.
- Whether Clayface's home-entertainment run pushes it fully into profit, which could make the case for more films like it.
- Which projects Gunn and Safran will keep producing beyond Man of Tomorrow, The Batman Part II and The People v. Gorilla Grodd.
The next real date is December 1 , when Latcham officially takes the job. Watch for the first slate announcement from the new regime. If Swamp Thing is on it, DC horror lives. If it isn't mentioned, start worrying.
Bottom Line
James Gunn didn't build DC Studios as a horror shop, but he left it with one of the clearest horror wins any superhero studio has had in years. Whether that turns into a lane or a footnote now belongs to a Marvel producer who helped make The Avengers. The smart business move is to keep making cheap, nasty, filmmaker-driven DC horror. We'll see if the smart move wins.
Your turn: which DC horror movie do you want to see survive the shake-up most, Swamp Thing , Constantine or a Clayface sequel? Tell us in the comments.
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: James Gunn via Wikimedia Commons ( Gage Skidmore, author and license), cropped with text added. Trailer: DC / Warner Bros.
Sources: TheWrap (exit), Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, iHorror, Dread Central, Esquire, Fiction Horizon, MakeUseOf, TheWrap (box office), The Numbers: Clayface, The Numbers: Slither, The Numbers: Dawn of the Dead, The Numbers: Brightburn, The Numbers: The Woman in Black, The Numbers: Speak No Evil, The Numbers: Supergirl.
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