It's been over three years since DC Studios announced its "Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters" slate. Overseen by James Gunn and Peter Safran, the franchise is off to a strong start (Superman was last year's highest-grossing blockbuster), even though several projects have failed to come to fruition. That, Creature Commandos, and to a lesser extent, Peacemaker Season 2, have also received positive reviews.
2026 is going to be a big test for the studio, as Supergirl, Lanterns, and Clayface were neither written nor directed by Gunn. However, his fingerprints are all over at least two of them, particularly when it comes to the villains...villains who are blatantly inspired by the filmmaker's disdain for the right-wingers who got him fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2018.
Given the current political climate, this article will likely stir up very different feelings in those of you reading it. With that in mind, let's make one thing clear: this is not an attack on conservatives or those who would consider themselves on the right.
Extremists on both sides of the fence are problematic, and the characters we'll talk about here—violent incels, conspiracy theories spreading fake news on social media, racists, and Nazis—are, without a doubt, villains. They're not being defended, and we're not taking aim at Gunn for portraying them in a deservedly negative light.
The bigger question is, why have right-wing extremists started dominating the DCU? In Creature Commandos, the Sons of Themyscira were incels and gun-toting rednecks. Superman saw Lex Luthor using mind-controlled monkeys to convince the world that the Man of Steel was some sort of harem-seeking pervert, not dissimilar to how some on the far right once weaponised Gunn's crude jokes from the past to convince Disney that he deserved to be fired.
As an aside, he shouldn't have been fired, and had apologised for any offence caused years earlier; the majority, including the Guardians of the Galaxy cast, agreed that Disney massively overreacted.
Peacemaker's Earth-X inhabitants were racist, right-wing Nazis. Meanwhile, a Supergirl test screening leak has claimed that Krem of the Yellow Hills leads a group of sex traffickers, all of whom sound an awful lot like women-hating incels rather than the murderous pirates from Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. In the case of Lanterns, while we're expecting some sort of cosmic element to whatever threatens that piece of the American Heartland, it's rumoured that they're also far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists.
The comic book Brainiac sets out to acquire all knowledge in the universe, but at this rate, it feels like we can expect Man of Tomorrow's version to be a racist incel, who comes to Earth because he thinks Superman is a "Chad." That's an over-the-top example, yes, but there's a throughline in the DCU where Gunn's understandable disdain for the far-right is seeping into almost every story.
We can't discount the possibility that the filmmaker is simply looking to reflect today's world, even if turning to "right-wing loons" as an easy target for these DCU projects feels a tad reductive and lazy.
Ultimately, whether this pattern is intentional social commentary, a reflection of Gunn's past experiences, or simply the easiest shorthand for "contemporary villains" in today's politically charged climate, it runs the risk of defining the DCU's antagonists in a very specific way. While the Superman helmer deserves credit for poking fun at real-world toxicities, do we really need to be reminded of them over and over again? Social media is bad enough without giving these people a platform as villains in a major comic book franchise.
At the end of the day, villains should challenge heroes and audiences in meaningful ways. If the DCU keeps recycling far-right extremists as the go-to bad guys, it may say more about Hollywood and Gunn's own anxieties than it does about the state of the world. Superhero movie bad guys need to evolve, surprise, and challenge us beyond being just easy mirrors of today's headlines, and they don't always have to have something "real" to say. Then again, maybe we're just getting the antagonists we deserve in 2026...