The news broke in May that DC Studios had decided to shelve Sgt. Rock. There was some chatter about the movie shooting in 2026, but filmmaker Luca Guadagnino didn't exactly stick around and quickly moved on to a different project, Artificial.
His inexperience helming big-budget movies was listed as one of the possible reasons for Sgt. Rock's postponement, as were concerns about the UK's unpredictable weather. There were telltale signs of problems from the start, with Daniel Craig eyed to lead the movie before DC Studios suddenly pivoted to Colin Farrell.
Some believe Farrell was the cheaper option (James Gunn and Peter Safran don't appear keen on spending a huge amount of money on actors), despite Guadagnino being eager to reunite with Craig, whom he previously worked with on Queer.
Talking to Josh Horowitz, Gunn said he's still "hugely" excited to make Sgt. Rock, but when he was asked whether Guadagnino is still attached, the filmmaker simply replied, "No."
This comes after another recent interview, which saw the Superman helmer suggest the movie in its current iteration would have made all involved "look bad."
"We had a screenplay that—you know, a movie that was greenlit. We got second draft and third draft, and it just wasn’t changing. It wasn’t getting better. It was staying in the same place. And I said, 'We can’t make this film. We can’t. It’s not good. We know it’s not good.' Just because we have a good director attached and a good screenwriter, it doesn’t mean the script is working."
"Everyone is going to be upset at the end of this. It’s going to come out, the movie’s not going to be good. The director’s going to look bad, the screenwriter’s going to look bad, and we’re going to look bad. So I don’t want to have this. We’re not going to make the movie. And so we killed it."
It takes guts to scrap a movie that's been announced (not to mention upsetting a filmmaker of Guadagnino's calibre) because it, for lack of a better word, sucked. That's surely a better option than forging ahead with a middling script and trying to rescue a disappointing movie with reshoots. Look at how Captain America: Brave New World turned out.
Elsewhere in the interview, Gunn was asked for an update on James Mangold's Swamp Thing movie. "We talked to James the other day. No, he hasn't delivered a script. He's been distracted with his billion of movies," Gunn laughed. "We're talking about it again."
It's evident that several of the "Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters" movies and TV shows announced at the start of 2023 aren't taking shape as quickly as anyone would have liked. It now remains to be seen whether they eventually happen or DC Studios moves on to other stories.
You can hear more from Gunn in the player below.