Do we like James Gunn?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with one real stain from over a decade ago that he apologised for.
James Gunn is the bloke who turned a rag-tag bunch of space misfits into Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel, then crossed to DC and now co-runs DC Studios. His Superman reboot landed in 2025 and he's busy on its follow-up, Man of Tomorrow. He's a director with a clear signature: weird, warm and a bit sweary.
The stoush that defined his career came in July 2018, when Disney dropped him from Guardians Vol. 3. The Daily Caller published crude tweets he'd posted between 2008 and 2011, which NBC reports were first resurfaced by far-right figures after he criticised President Trump. Disney's chairman called them “indefensible and inconsistent with our studios' values”. Gunn apologised, saying “I used to make a lot of offensive jokes” and that he no longer does, and Disney rehired him in March 2019.
On the harm check, the old tweets are the stain, and a real one, but he owned them and the sources we read show no repeat. In 2025 he described Superman as an immigrant story and said it was mostly about human kindness, which isn't campaigning against anyone. Nothing in the reporting we read ties him to the culture-war grifters or to anti-LGBTQ+ campaigning, though we found less on his recent co-stars and partners than we'd like.
The Superman press run was the big recent dust-up. After Gunn told The Times that “Superman is the story of America”, Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote that it was “Another film we won't be seeing”. He didn't back down, saying obviously there would be “jerks out there” who'd be offended, before adding “But screw them.” His brother Sean, who's in the film, defended him too.
Lately the story is the box office. According to Deadline as relayed by Slashfilm, Supergirl cost $186 million and opened to $38 million in the US and Canada, and co-chief Peter Safran called it disappointing but said it wouldn't derail the plan. It finished at $125.9 million worldwide, the lowest-grossing DC film. That's a business problem rather than a character one, but it's why people are asking if he survives.
So where does that leave us? A fair bloke who said some rotten things as a younger man, said so himself, and has made kindness his brand ever since. Where he sits on trans issues specifically, we didn't find his own words either way, so that's a gap. On what we could read, he's easy to support.