James Gunn encourages Marvel and DC fans to set aside rivalries

Superheroes rule the box office. It’s no secret that Disney has had a ton of success with its Marvel Cinematic Universe, while Warner Bros. has lagged behind trying to adapt DC’s decades of popular comics to the big screen. Passions run hot on both sides, but need they? Does one comics titan have to be “better” than the others? Can’t all superhero fans just get along?

That’s the gist of the message James Gunn sent out in a recent flurry of thankful tweets. If you’re just joining us, Gunn has had a hell of a year. After successfully helming the first two movies in the Guardians of the Galaxy series for Marvel, Disney fired him after a series of distasteful tweets from his past surfaced. Then he went over to the DC side of things to direct a reboot of Suicide Squad, which he’s working on now, before Marvel hired him back to helm Guardians 3. He’s uniquely situated to heal whatever rift exists between these two camps. Will these messages of hope help?

I completely agree: all these superheroes can live together, and so far as movies go, there’s been evidence of the two helping to spur each other towards bigger and better things. Sure, the MCU has been more successful overall, but Warner Bros. was the first studio to get a big-budget female-led superhero movie up on the screen with Wonder Woman, and now Marvel has a whole slate of them lined up. We can live and let live.

That said, it’s objectively funny that the very first conversation I saw beneath Gunn’s call for inter-fandom civility was this one:

I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Neither Suicide Squad nor Guardians of the Galaxy 3 have release dates yet, but when they come out, I’m sure we can all watch them peaceably.

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