Marc Guggenheim has been involved in the DC television universe for about 10 years. He’s worked on Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman, and Legends of Tomorrow, and was a big part of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the five-hour crossover between a lot of the properties. And now that DC seems to be moving on without him, Guggenheim has penned a short essay on how upset he is that James Gunn and Peter Safran haven’t given him the time of day.
It feels a little bit petty, honestly, and the tone of his newsletter is more than a little entitled for a man who has spent a decade garnering opportunities to work on comics and films in addition to all the TV shows he’s had his hands in. “James Gunn announced that he assembled a ‘writers room’ to help chart out what the new ‘DC Universe’ under his and James Safran’s leadership is going to be,” Guggenheim wrote in his early February newsletter. “Suffice it to say, I am not among that group.”
He goes on to say that even if he didn’t get a job in the writer’s room the least that leadership could have done was give him a meeting. Which, I mean, I suppose it’s fair to want the new head of a massive franchise to pay attention to your work, I get it. He said he wanted “a conversation. A small recognition of what I’d tried to contribute to the grand tapestry that is the DC Universe. I’d only spent nine years toiling in that vineyard, after all.”
There are some platitudes about fans, but truly, Guggenheim is incredibly focused on the fact that his work has, for the most part, been ignored by Hollywood. Which sucks, yeah, but it really feels like Guggenheim might be better served by creating original work instead of playing in someone else’s sandbox. But, he also managed to spend a decade making incredibly popular TV. “Simply put, the Arrowverse hasn’t led to any other gigs, so it feels — at least on a career level — that I really wasted my time,” as he puts it. As a guy who managed to oversee an entire corner of the DC universe, including multiple shows, was he only using it all as stepping stone?
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