James Gunn swore this show was alive. Now, it's dead.

Two more DCU shows just flatlined, and James Gunn spent the better part of the last year insisting neither of them were even sick.

Variety has now confirmed what The Ankler first reported: both the Amanda Waller series and the Wonder Woman prequel Paradise Lost are no longer priorities for the studio and are no longer being actively developed. Neither show was ever ordered to series, which is the polite way of saying they died in the writers’ room, not on the cutting room floor.

Gunn Said Otherwise. Repeatedly.

This isn’t a quiet fade. Gunn has personally shot down these exact cancellation rumors more than once. When fans floated the idea that Paradise Lost was shelved, he responded on Threads with a flat “Definitely not,” adding he was baffled by “one insanely wrong thing after the other. What is going on?” More recently he described the Wonder Woman spinoff as being in “extreme development.”

Waller had its own trail of reassurances too. As recently as last fall, promoting Peacemaker Season 2, Gunn told People the Amanda Waller series hasn’t been shelved, and that DC Studios is still “working on” the show. Viola Davis has kept the character alive in the meantime, voicing her in Creature Commandos while waiting for news on her own star vehicle.

Now both are gone. And they’re not alone — shows centered around Batman villains Catwoman and Poison Ivy were recently pitched to DC Studios and HBO, but they passed on both. That’s four shelved projects from a slate that started with five announced series in January 2023. Only Creature Commandos and Lanterns actually made it to a screen.

Follow The Money

The timing lines up with a rough summer at the box office. The studio has reportedly called it quits with Waller and Paradise Lost following Supergirl’s recent box-office flop, which may have cost Warner Bros. and DC Studios north of $125 million. Read between those lines and the message is obvious: fewer bets on standalone spinoffs nobody asked to see headline a show, more focus on the theatrical slate that’s actually been landing — Superman was a hit, Clayface arrives in October, and Man of Tomorrow is lined up for 2027.

Even Lanterns, which just premiered on HBO, isn’t fully safe. Despite a co-showrunner already being hired for a second season, HBO has not yet renewed it despite a co-showrunner already having been hired for the second season. The DCU television experiment that looked so ambitious on a whiteboard in 2023 is looking a lot thinner three years later.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: when the guy running the studio keeps telling you a show is alive right up until the week it’s confirmed dead, how much stock do you put in the next “still happening” update?