James Gunn has named Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as the diamond characters at the centre of his DC Universe, confirming the three heroes who will anchor DC Studios for years to come. The DC Studios co-chief set out the plan in posts on Threads this week, in response to a now-deleted post about the direction of the shared universe.
Gunn said the often cited 8 to 10 year roadmap he pitched with fellow co-chief Peter Safran was never only a list of story points. He wrote that it was also the plan for DC as a whole, covering which heroes the studio would build around and how it would work with filmmakers. The diamond characters, he wrote, are Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, along with smaller characters the studio could turn into diamonds.
“You can look at my quotes from January ’23 when we started and I said we were going to do exactly what we’re doing,” Gunn wrote in his first post. He said some stories would stand alone, as the Guardians of the Galaxy films did, and some would form part of a larger narrative structure, as the Superman Saga does. Each piece of the larger story, he added, should work on its own, with or without seeing everything else.
What diamond characters mean for the DCU
Gunn did not offer a formal definition of the term in his posts. The sense of his message was plain enough: diamond characters are the heroes with the widest reach and the strongest claim on the studio’s long term investment. These diamond characters are the names audiences know first, and the ones other projects can be built around.
Superman has already led the new universe on screen. Gunn’s Superman film opened the DCU’s first chapter in 2025, and the hero is set to return in Man of Tomorrow. Batman has barely been seen so far, apart from a silhouette in Creature Commandos. A standalone Batman film, reported to be titled The Brave and the Bold, was announced at the January 2023 slate reveal, but Gunn has since confirmed that his plans for the character have changed since then.
Wonder Woman is the only member of the trio without a film of her own in the new universe so far. Reports say a Wonder Woman film is in development, with Ana Nogueira, the writer of Supergirl, attached to write the script. Gunn has previously hinted that news on the character was coming that he could not yet share.
Standalone films and the Superman Saga
The distinction Gunn drew between standalone stories and saga stories matters to how the DCU is put together. Clayface, the horror tinged film now in production, is a standalone in the Guardians mould, Gunn wrote. The Superman Saga, which began with Superman, carries the larger narrative thread, but Gunn insisted that each entry in it should still stand on its own.
Smaller heroes who could become diamond characters
Alongside the three established names, Gunn named three smaller characters he believes could be built into diamond characters over time: Krypto the Superdog, John Stewart and Peacemaker. Each has already appeared in the DCU, and each has a different route to a larger role.
Krypto, Superman’s dog, has appeared in both Superman and Supergirl, and the response to the character has led to a new animated children’s show. John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre, co-led the HBO series Lanterns alongside Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan, which set Stewart up as Earth’s Green Lantern. Pierre has already been confirmed for a part in Man of Tomorrow. Peacemaker, played by John Cena, is one of the few heroes carried over from the previous DC film era into the new one, after leading two seasons of his own HBO Max series, and the season two finale left several doors open for the character.
How diamond characters fit the wider roadmap
Gunn tied the diamond characters to the rest of the roadmap in the same posts. The plan, he wrote, also covers filmmaker freedom and room for multiple tones and ratings, along with influences from Star Wars and the storytelling of George R. R. Martin. The aim, as he described it in January 2023, was to use the biggest heroes to support lesser known characters.
He closed his Threads posts on an upbeat note about the work so far. “It’s exciting seeing things start to come together,” he wrote, “and all that makes me even more excited for what we have in store for everyone in Man of Tomorrow.” The next test of the plan will be whether that film, and the Batman and Wonder Woman projects behind it, can give the three diamond characters the shared screen presence fans have been waiting for.