June 17, 2025
James Gunn recently wore his heart on his sleeve and touched on what he believes is the biggest issues plaguing the movie industry today.
He shared his candid and unfiltered thoughts in an interview with Rolling Stone.
That conversation saw him getting pretty honest and admit right off the bat, “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies.”
And “it’s not because of home screens getting so good,” either he clarified too.
“The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay,” Gunn claimed.
“Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”
Before this “we’ve been really lucky so far, because ‘Supergirl’s’ script was so f****** good off the bat. And then ‘Lanterns’ came in, and the script was so f****** good. ‘Clayface,’ same thing. So f****** good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
But ultimately that was made possible because of Warner Bros and the fact that “we don’t have the mandate [at DC] to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality.”
“We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible.” Because on average “nothing goes before there’s a screenplay that I personally am happy with,” he said in his concluding statement.