James Gunn spent the better part of a decade as Hollywood's favorite redemption story.
Fired by Disney in 2018 over decade-old tweets, rehired within a year after the cast of Guardians of the Galaxy publicly demanded his return, then handed the keys to the entire DC universe by a rival studio.
It was the rare case where accountability and second chances seemed to coexist.
What's left is a man who has quietly accumulated more cultural power than any single filmmaker in modern American entertainment, with final say over Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and dozens of characters that used to belong to everyone.
One person now decides which stories get told, which actors get cast, which versions of American mythology reach a movie screen in 200 countries.
It hired a curator with veto power over an entire shelf of our shared imagination.
The timing should bother you more than the job title.
Hollywood has spent five years consolidating.
Studios merged, streaming services cannibalized each other, and the mid-budget drama that once launched new voices all but disappeared.
Into that vacuum stepped a handful of men with franchise authority — and Gunn is now the most powerful of them.
He did, in the sense that his movies made money and his fans are loyal.
But "earned" and "should have" are different questions.
The same industry that couldn't find room for a dozen original filmmakers found room for one man to run two competing superhero empires at once, at least until the split, and then one entirely.
There's a deeper unease here that has nothing to do with Gunn personally.
Americans have quietly accepted that our myths — the ones about truth, justice, and the vulnerable outsider who saves everyone — are now managed as brand assets.
A character created by two Cleveland teenagers in 1938 to fight social injustice now answers to a corporate org chart with one name at the top.
Every announcement, every casting leak, every cryptic social media post gets treated like civic news.
We've outsourced the storytelling function of a culture to a man who is very good at his job and completely unaccountable to anyone but a board of directors.
Maybe the next Superman is exactly what a fractured country needs.
But greatness was never the issue — the issue is that we no longer have a say, and we stopped expecting one.
The uncomfortable truth is that we didn't lose our myths to James Gunn.
Final Thoughts
We sold them, one ticket at a time, and convinced ourselves it was the same thing as caring about them.