James Gunn seems to spend a lot of his time debunking various rumors attached to his movies. While rumors are always going to go along with the job of directing movies, especially major franchise projects with popular characters, Gunn certainly doesn’t want fans taken in by incorrect reporting. With a lot of new projects on the horizon with Gunn’s new DC Universe, it seems he wants to get out ahead of all the rumors.
In a post to his Threads account, James Gunn says he is being inundated with questions about different actors who have allegedly been cast in the different roles that may appear in the future of the franchise. It turns out there are a couple of pretty good rules of thumb for dealing with many of the rumors First off, any rumor is probably false, to begin with, but it absolutely is if we’re talking about a movie that doesn’t have a script. Gunn said…
I get asked about rumors of various actors being cast in various roles every day. Just a blanket rule to keep in mind while assessing whether these rumors have any truth to them (99% of the time they’re false) - we are never going to cast roles without scripts.
It’s a pretty simple rule, and one that certainly makes a lot of sense. Until you have a script, you don’t really know what sort of character you’re dealing with. And that script is going to inform what actors you decide to talk to about it. Even a character as iconic and well-known as Batman has been portrayed differently over the decades on both the page and the screen. So until you know what sort of Batman you need, you don’t know what sort of actor you need.
To that end, one then has to ask the question of what entries in the DCU have scripts and thus might see casting reports. We already know that the Superman: Legacy cast is taking shape. Most recently we learned Nicholas Hoult will be playing Lex Luthor. It’s possible all the major roles have been cast at this point, but if we hear a significant rumor, it’s at least possible it’s real.
Another upcoming DC movie where we might start to see casting rumors that could be real is Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Gunn himself recently confirmed that a script for the movie was done, so a search for the lead character could be getting underway in the short term.
Beyond that, we don’t know much, though we know that Batman: The Brave and the Bold is still in development script-wise, which we can now confirm means no casting reports are accurate. This certainly won’t stop every erroneous report, but perhaps it will keep fans from getting too excited when they hear things about an upcoming film that don’t turn out to be true.
