How Brightburn Weirdly Benefitted From James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy Firing
When James Gunn was fired by Disney last summer, one of the projects most directly affected was David Yarovesky’s Brightburn. More than the fact that Gunn had a direct link to the movie as an Executive Producer, the news about his removal from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was announced just hours before the start of a San Diego Comic-Con panel that was scheduled to see the film’s title and plot revealed to the world prior to its scheduled November 30, 2018 release date. Because of the controversy, the decision was made to push the horror feature, and Screen Gems ultimately decided to make it a May 2019 release.
But while this may all seem like it would be a bad thing, in retrospect, David Yarovesky feels that it actually wound up helping Brightburn a lot.
Earlier this month I had the wonderful pleasure of sitting down with David Yarovesky to interview him for our superhero podcast HeroBlend, and the first question I asked was about what happened at San Diego Comic-Con last summer. Curious about his perspective on the ordeal, I asked how the events wound up impacting Brightburn as a movie, and he explained why it surprisingly wound up being a good thing for the project. Said the director,
There are many filmmakers who find themselves begging for more time and resources when they are working on a feature, and while David Yarovesky surely would have preferred getting both of those things for Brightburn under totally different circumstances, things did weirdly wind up working in his production’s favor at the end of the day (not to mention the fact that James Gunn was eventually rehired by Disney, bringing everything back to status quo). Yarovesky wound up getting an extra six months to make his second film as good as it could be, and it was time he took full advantage of when it was given.
I followed up by asking about exactly how David Yarovesky took advantage of the situation, and while he didn’t get extremely detailed in the discussion, he did note that the period allowed for a small amount of extra production time, as well as some much-needed edit bay work. He even admitted that Brightburn may have been delayed even without the whole “James Gunn being fired” incident, as the schedule as it had been established apparently may not have been enough for the film. He explained,
The subject of the delay was one of many things that I had the opportunity to discuss about the making of Brightburn, and we really had a wonderful spoiler-free conversation. You can listen to my entire chat with David Yarovesky on the latest episode of our HeroBlend podcast, which is available to stream and download right now:
Starring Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson Dunn, and Matt Jones, Brightburn is a twist on the classic Superman mythos, and crafts a story questioning what would happen if a Man of Steel-esque being was filled with natural malevolent intent. The movie is now playing in theaters everywhere, and we’ll have more for you about the feature in the coming days here on CinemaBlend!
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Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.