James Gunn shares 'number-one reason' why 'movie industry is dying'
James Gunn believes "unfinished screenplays" are responsible for the "movie industry dying".
The co-head of DC Studios cited the "number-one reason" why he believes the industry is struggling is that a lot of bad films have been released because projects have been rushed as a result of production dates being set before their scripts are completely ready.
He told Rolling Stone: 'Listen, you can do everything right and make a bad movie. I'm really compassionate towards people that put their all into a movie. I know some people that were my former workers at Marvel — people who made some of the worst movies.
"There were people that were lazy and didn't put their time in. And then there were other directors that worked really hard and maybe didn't have the best movie come out, but they did everything they could.
"I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It's not because of home screens getting so good.
'The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.'
The 58-year-old filmmaker revealed that when he and Peter Safran took over at DC Studios, he stressed that any films under his guidance wouldn't go into production until their scripts were finished, and admitted he had "just killed a project" because the screenplay was incomplete.
He said: '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.
'And 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.'
The Superman director also believes not having a mandate from Warner Bros. to deliver a certain number of projects has helped DC Studios, because he believes the previous pressure Marvel faced from Disney to increase their output "killed them".
He said: 'We have to treat every project as if we're lucky.
'We don't have the mandate [at DC Studios] 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. Nothing goes before there's a screenplay that I personally am happy with.'
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