Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
The upcoming DC cinematic universe reboot will also extend to video games.
DC Studios’ co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran have revealed more details on the state of the upcoming DC Universe (DCU) slate of movies, which plans to include video games based on iconic comic book characters. In a recent presentation reportedly attended by IGN, the duo announced that they were working closely with Warner Bros. Games to develop projects based on the DCU.
The DCU’s first official release was this year’s Creature Commandos, released on the streaming service Max. Arguably, the real launchpad for this new cinematic universe will be James Gunn’s Superman, which hits theaters later this July.
The DCU is getting a range of comicbook-inspired video games
This week, DC Studios’ co-leaders James Gunn and Peter Safran gave an update on the future slate of the DCU. The DCU is a blossoming universe built around heroes and villains from the pages of DC Comics, filled with fresh faces and rebooted stories following the end of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The universe is said to revolve around not only live-action and animated movies and TV series, but video games as well.
According to IGN, Gunn and Safran also spoke about the DCU’s upcoming video games during this presentation. Reportedly, the hierarchy of power at Warner Bros. Games has now changed slightly - instead of DC-related video game projects operating within their own bubble, they now work in tandem with DC Studios-related projects.
What this means is that Gunn and Safran are now involved in upcoming DC games from their very inception, having seen these unnamed projects “at their earliest stages” and working closely with game studios like NetherRealm and Rocksteady Studios “on character designs and story.”
According to IGN, Gunns said of the video game projects: “We see designs for the projects in their very earliest stages. We talk about those. We talk about when they're talking about what the story might be, we say, ‘Well, maybe you want to go this way because we're planning on maybe doing something with this character and so forth and so on,’ and help to deal with that.”
Since it’s early days for the DCU itself, let alone its video game projects, Gunn also confirmed that we’ll only see the first DCU game in “a couple of years.” The movie director is also “giving notes on designs” for outfits worn by DC Comics characters in gaming projects, which includes Fortnite.
“When you talk about interaction with our video game guys, with our gaming department, those are also things that historically there wasn't a lot of collaboration on [...] Now it's, hey, we're talking to Fortnite. Which characters should we focus on? Literally, James is signing off on designs,” Safran added.
Expect more DC Comics-inspired skins in Fortnite in the near future, and ones bearing Gunn’s own approval no less. As for what DCU has in the works for its gaming projects, one can only speculate. However, thanks to a recent report, we do know that Rocksteady is tinkering with a Batman game, while Monolith Production’s Wonder Woman game has stalled.
Based on Gunn and Safran specifically calling out NetherRealm as a studio it’s currently working with, it’s likely that the studio is moving on from Mortal Kombat 1 to work on a potential Injustice 3 - or some other DC Comics-adjacent project.
