James Gunn recently spoke about why DC Studios is not making movies based on The Authority, a comic series based on a group of “cynical and brutally pragmatic superheroes”. Gunn, who is gearing for the release of the next Superman film, responded to a question on threads that asked him when they are going to “cast the rest of the Authority members?” In response, the veteran filmmaker wrote, “We won’t greenlight a film until we have a finished script we’re happy with and, in general, we won’t cast a film until the script is finished. This is why some projects are moving faster than anticipated and others more slowly. It’s always gonna be quality first no matter what.”
The Authority was created by comic artists Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in 1999. It has a host of characters including Swift (Shen Li-Min), Apollo (Sun God), The Doctor (Jeroen Thornedike), Midnighter (Lucas Trent), Jack Hawksmoor (The God of Cities), Jenny Sparks (The Spirit of the Twentieth Century) and Engineer (Angela Spica). Interestingly, even as there is no word on a stand-alone film based on The Authority, one of its characters will appear in the upcoming Superman film, set to release on July 11, 2025. The character of Engineer, played by actor María Gabriela de Faría, will share the screen alongside Superman, played by David Corenswet.
Back in January 2023, Gunn described The Authority as “one of his passion projects”. In a press statement that unveiled the upcoming DC Studios projects, Gunn referred to The Authority characters as “morally gray characters” of the DC Universe.
He said that the studio is working with writers to develop a screenplay and said, “I’ve been working really hard on it with the writers and we’re starting to put together the entire story. This is a big movie. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Authority. They’re WildStorm characters. WildStorm was a comics imprint that was bought by DC that I really love.”
He added, “The Authority’s a very different kind of superhero story. They are basically good-intentioned, but they think that the world is completely broken and the only way to fix it is to take things into their own hands, whether that means killing people, destroying heads of state, changing governments—basically, whatever they want to do to make the world better. We’ll see how that journey goes for them.”
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