James Gunn is shedding gentle on the second he needed to inform Henry Cavill he was not returning to play Superman.
Throughout a current look on the Blissful Unhappy Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz, the DC Studios boss briefly broke down the complicated timeline that noticed Cavill announce he was set to reprise the character earlier than asserting roughly two months later that he was not shifting ahead in Gunn’s superhero universe.
“We had been coping with making an attempt to determine if we might take the job at DC Studios, and we’re speaking to David Zaslav and all of the authorized individuals there, and determining what our offers can be,” he recalled. “And the day our deal closed, hastily they had been asserting that Henry was again.”
Gunn admitted that he was stunned by the information. “I’m like, what’s going on? Like, we all know what the plan is, the plan was to return in and do Superman,” he stated, referring to the new 2025 movie that sees David Corenswet tackle the titular position.
“That was actually unlucky, I’m like, this poor man. And so Peter [Safran] and I [knew] the suitable factor to do is to sit down down with [Cavill] and speak to him,” he stated. “And we sat down, we talked to him, he was an absolute gentleman, an awesome man about it. He stated, ‘The one factor I ask is that I’m in a position to reveal it myself versus it coming from you guys.’”
Of breaking the information to Cavill, the Guardians of the Galaxy writer-director stated “it was actually unfair to him and was a complete bummer,” however there have been exterior influences who “wished to tackle what they wished to do at DC and had been making an attempt to drive their approach and it simply was by no means part of the equation.”
Regardless of not returning to steer Gunn’s Superman, Cavill and Corenswet had been in communication earlier than the latter Man of Metal took on the enduring position.
“I had the pleasure of exchanging letters with two earlier Supermans, Henry Cavill and Tyler Hoechlin. Each of them, curiously, kind of stated in their very own phrases, ‘I’m not gonna attempt to offer you any suggestions,’” Corenswet stated on the movie’s London premiere. “They had been very encouraging and we had a beautiful change. … I’m excited to fulfill them sooner or later, it’ll be nice once we can all get in a room collectively.”
On the tailend of their dialog about Cavill, host Horowitz requested if it’d be “too complicated” to recast the actor in Gunn’s DC Universe, to which he responded, “No, as one other character? Completely not. I talked to him about it on that day. I might like to put Henry in one thing.”