James Gunn’s reboot of the DCU doesn’t start until Superman arrives in 2025, but he said the movie is already done filming to give the teams involved as much time as possible to perfect its finished look, and especially the quality of its VFX. The director’s comments were in response to growing concerns about terrible special effects in blockbuster movies as CGI artists get pushed to the breaking point.
“This is why we wrapped on Superman a year before release and why they’ve been hard at work on many shots for months before that,” Gunn posted on Threads on August 18. “This is why we start heartily editing during the shoot. It’s why I prepare so vigorously and why we only shoot finished screenplays. And Supergirl, which I’m not directing, is being handled the same way. I can’t praise the VFX artists that help us create magic enough.”
The Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad writer and director was tapped in 2022 by Warner Bros. to rebuild its big-screen DC universe, and Superman: Legacy, arriving July 11, 2025, is the first project in that endeavor. The first image released from that movie, which was “taken on set by Jess Miglio and was entirely in-camera,” showed the titular hero suiting up in an apartment while a giant purple laser fired in the background. It raised all sorts of questions among some fans about the look and art direction of the movie, and leaked photos from July continued to sow skepticism.
The recent frenzy for big-budget blockbusters in theaters and new content from streaming platforms has led to an overreliance on green screens and post-production effects that, in addition to stretching VFX houses too thin, also just look terrible. There was no better evidence of this than last year’s The Flash, the last gasp of a pre-Gunn DCU, which looked comically bad at times, with some fans dunking on the effects for looking like they were ripped from a mid-budget video game.
“If you do some research you’ll see my films have always taken a different approach and I’ve always given my VFX artist-collaborators time to do their jobs properly, and the respect they deserve,” Gunn wrote over the weekend. “And the quality of the VFX in those films is uniformly great because of it (and because my friends at Weta and Framestore and ILM and more are amazingly talented).”