James Gunn posted a Skydance promo video on Instagram and Threads this week, and the comments section did what comments sections do best: told him exactly what everyone was already thinking. The short version, per Cosmic Book News, is that DCU fans have decided Gunn is kissing up to the new bosses because he's worried about keeping his job.

Hard to argue with them, and I'm not going to try.

Context for anyone who's been speedrunning Elden Ring instead of following the corporate soap opera: Skydance merged with Paramount, David Ellison's shop now controls a giant chunk of the entertainment map, and every studio head in Hollywood is doing the corporate equivalent of bringing an apple for the teacher. Gunn posting a Skydance hype video to his personal accounts, unprompted, looks a lot less like enthusiasm and a lot more like a man refreshing LinkedIn in a panic.

The fans clocked it instantly. The replies flooded in with variations of "he's trying to keep his job," and when your fanbase's unified theory of your behavior is "please don't fire me," the brand has a problem. These are the same fans who watched Superman, argued about Superman, and have been sitting through the slowest universe-building rollout since the actual DC Extended Universe died on the table.

Fairness to Gunn for exactly one paragraph, because I can do that when it's earned. Superman made real money. The DCU slate exists on paper. The man has shipped exactly one film in this grand ten-year plan, and it performed. Nobody at Skydance is sharpening the axe based on box office. The problem is optics, and optics were the one thing Gunn used to be great at before he had a corporate hierarchy to manage upward into.

Remember when Gunn was the guy? The scrappy Troma guy, the Guardians guy, the guy who made a talking raccoon make grown men cry. His whole brand was that he didn't do this stuff. Now he's reposting corporate sizzle reels like a regional manager hyping the new company mission statement, and the fans who followed him for a decade of set photos and cast announcements are watching it happen in real time.

That's where the real damage sits. The trust was the product. Gunn sold the DCU reboot on "trust me, I'm one of you," and every thirsty corporate repost chips a little more off that foundation. Fans don't expect him to fight the suits in the parking lot, but they do expect him to not look like a guy auditioning for his own job with a repost.

The comments being this unified is the tell. DC fandom usually runs a permanent civil war, the Snyder crowd and the Gunn crowd throwing chairs at each other until the sun dies. Not this time. Everyone agrees the post looked desperate. When you lose the room that badly on a repost, you don't fix it with another repost.

My advice, free of charge: stop posting, start shipping. The way out of "is Gunn getting fired" discourse is a second movie that people like. Everything else is noise, and the fans already told him what the noise sounds like.