There were two comic book stories of note this past week. The first is that Spider-Man: Brand New Day set the all-time opening weekend box office record, unseating Avengers: Endgame, and has already made a billion dollars by its first Tuesday. The second was that the DCU’s upcoming Jimmy Olsen series casted Mary Holland as its female lead.

Needless to say, Marvel and DC are in very different places right now. And DC wasn’t in a great spot before the shift from the DCEU to the DCU, coming off a string of critical and audience bombs for the most part. A change needed to be made, and that change was James Gunn, a man who has never directed a bad superhero project in his life.

But running an entire universe is s a different story.

No one was expecting DC to compete with Marvel immediately after this switch. The MCU has an 18-year head start (yes, Iron Man was released in 2008; how old do you feel?), and DC just started this switch in earnest within the past year.

While Spider-Man is the most popular hero in the world by a significant margin right now, that’s not really the issue, and that’s not under DC or Gunn’s control. But what Gunn’s plan appears to be is something that does not really mesh with what audiences want from a universe like this.

Starting with Superman? Sure, great choice. He’s a notoriously hard character to get right, but the earnest David Corenswet version felt like the right move. But before and after that? Critical praise can only get you so far. The Gunn-era projects have been:

• The Peacemakerseries, which Gunn had to retcon to get into the DCU at all.
• Creature Commandos,an animated- Suicide Squad-ish series full of monsters.
• Supergirl, a not-great film that Gunn did not write or direct, but he raved about the script ahead of time. The movie is now one of the biggest box office bombs in superhero history.
• Clayface, the first Batman-related film of the DCU, focused on probably his eighth most well-known villain.
• Lanterns, an HBO series that has fans concerned that it has turned the cosmic hero into something perhaps too grounded, and it may not be the introduction the character needs.
• This Jimmy Olsen show, which yes, is similar to a comic run of adventures from the character, but he does not exactly feel like a priority focus right now.
• Man of Tomorrow,written and directed by Gunn, but that makes three of the first four DCU films Superman-related.

The problem is not just what is the primary focus of this first string of DC projects; it’s what isn’t there.

Outside of Superman, we have not seen Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman or perhaps most importantly, Batman. That character is currently sort of a mess, given that everyone loves the Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson version of Bruce Wayne, which will soon have to exist alongside the Gunn Brave and the Bold version, but we have gotten close to zero information on the status of that film.

As for the others, only Wonder Woman is in the works; the problem there is that it’s being written by the person who did the Supergirl script – someone who Gunn likes so much, he put her on three different projects. Gulp.

I’ve previously said that I don’t think the solution is to toss Gunn out. What happens then? You have to find an entirely new overlord to either start over again or awkwardly drag Gunn’s vision elsewhere? I think the solution is that Gunn has to get away from this idea that people want to see, or at least will show up for, increasingly niche characters when the big ones are yet to be found.

The DCEU did many things wrong, but at least it got to the big ones quickly (perhaps too quickly, given some of the rushed-feeling films).

Gunn could get away with this when his obscure character films were great and part of a larger universe. How he elevated the profile of Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel was nothing short of a miracle. But this is different as he now moves out of writing and directing and instead, delegating. We just saw how that went with Supergirl, and it raises questions about future Wonder Woman and Batman projects. Something has to change.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube____,and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller seriesand The Earthborn Trilogy.