The exit comes three years after Gunn renamed his debut DC film from Superman: Legacy to simply Superman, a decision that now reads differently.
James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down from their leadership roles at DC Studios, according to Koimoi, closing out a chapter that began with one of the most closely watched superhero reboots in years.
The pair took charge of the new DC Universe in 2022 and used Superman, released July 11, 2025, as the opening statement. That film was supposed to be the start of something long-term. Instead, a little over a year after its release, the men who built it are walking away from the corner office.
Which makes an old decision about the movie's title suddenly worth revisiting.
Why Gunn dropped Legacy
Superman wasn't always called Superman. Gunn's script carried the working title Superman: Legacy for a stretch of development, a name that nodded to the character's eight-decade history. Gunn cut the word before the film ever reached theatres.
He explained the call to Rolling Stone ahead of release, tracing it back to what he called a premortem, a planning session held months before cameras rolled where the team imagined everything that could sink the project. Gunn told the outlet, "I'm sick of the superhero title, colon, other-name thing," pointing to how worn out that naming convention had become across the genre.
There was a second reason too. Gunn felt Legacy framed the film as something backward-looking, a tribute to what Superman used to be, when he wanted the movie to push the character forward instead. The film still dealt with legacy as a theme, Gunn has said, it just didn't need the word stamped across the poster. His team agreed, and Superman: Legacy quietly became just Superman.
It read, at the time, like a filmmaker trimming fat off a title for a universe he planned to run for years. Now, with Gunn and Safran heading for the exit, Koimoi's framing of the title swap carries a different weight. Gunn wanted to build toward DC's future. He's leaving that future to whoever comes next.
Neither Gunn nor Safran has laid out what prompted the departure, and there's no confirmation yet on who takes over DC Studios or what it means for films already in the pipeline. Superman's box office run and the response to Gunn's broader slate had largely been treated as evidence the reboot was working. Whether the leadership change changes that calculus is the next thing to watch, along with whatever DC and Warner Bros. Say officially about who runs the studio from here.
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