The “awful” Christopher Nolan movies James Gunn hated: “I have problems with both”
One of the weirdest things about the ongoing superhero boom in cinema is the tribalism, with many diehard fans refusing to accept that it’s perfectly acceptable to enjoy spandex-clad blockbusters that hail from either side of the Marvel/DC divide, which placed James Gunn in an unusual predicament.
The filmmaker, who hasn’t directed anything that doesn’t involve a superhero since 2006’s lo-fi horror, Slither, was installed as the co-CEO of DC Studios alongside Peter Safran, which apparently didn’t sit well with a lot of people because he wasn’t Zack Snyder, who inspires a devotion that borders on the fanatical.
It was a curious domino effect that got him there in the first place, with Gunn being fired by Marvel Studios after historical social media reports emerged, which saw him head across town to Warner Bros. to make The Suicide Squad, before he returned to Marvel to cap off his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, prior to taking up permanent residency as the head of the company’s biggest comic book rivals.
Even people who hold the genre in a slightly higher regard than Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ridley Scott would surely agree that Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are two of the finest adaptations ever made. Even if they don’t, then it can’t be argued that they’re a pair of the most influential, since they’ve been name-dropped by the brains behind countless big-budget films since.
However, in what would develop an ironic bent over a decade later, when he was placed in charge and announced that his outfit would be making a new Batman flick, Gunn wasn’t one of those people. Since nothing is ever allowed to be forgotten on the internet, those pesky historical social media posts came back to haunt him again when his unfettered feelings on those aforementioned movies resurfaced.
“I have problems with both of Nolan’s films; I don’t think either one is a classic, and I don’t even really think Batman Begins is good,” he wrote in a reply.
Adding, “But they’re far superior to the first Batman. None of your defences get to the fact that, despite being the first cinematic dark take on Batman (So what? Stallone’s Judge Dredd was the first dark take on Judge Dredd), the movie is awful.”
He’s entitled to his opinion, and he won’t be the only person in the world who thinks Batman Begins is shite and The Dark Knight isn’t much better. That said, since he made his name at Marvel before hopping over the fence to take control of DC, a subsidiary of the studio that had Nolan under lock and key as its golden goose until it pissed him off and he upped sticks to Universal after two decades, you can only imagine how a very vocal minority reacted when his old musings were dredged up.
It’s perfectly OK to fly in the face of the consensus, and he’s far from the only filmmaker to spew vitriol in the direction of movies that have flirted with classic status at the very least, although it might increase the pressure and expectation whenever his Batman reboot rolls into production.
